Head of Data Infrastructure & Operations
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📢 Head of Data Infrastructure & Operations
London (3 days per week) | Global remit | Financial Services
We are seeking an experienced, business-oriented technology leader to take ownership of a global data infrastructure and operations capability supporting a mission-critical financial services environment.
This is a leadership role overseeing an established team of 25+ infrastructure and platform professionals across the UK, Eastern Europe, and India. The mandate is clear: stabilise, modernise, and operate a high-volume, low-latency data ecosystem while driving measurable business outcomes aligned to strategic objectives.
The Opportunity
A newly centralised data function has been formed from previously dispersed teams across Technology and Operations. The infrastructure capability is already in place — now it needs a disciplined leader to embed operational excellence, commercial accountability, and strong stakeholder engagement.
You will own global data platform operations spanning:
- Messaging infrastructure (Kafka)
- Database platforms (MongoDB and others)
The environment is fast-moving and outcome-driven. Success is measured by reliability, speed to value, cost control, and business trust — not technical experimentation.
Key Responsibilities
Infrastructure & Platform Leadership
- Own reliability, availability, scalability, and performance of global data platforms
- Drive infrastructure-as-code and automation standards
- Lead capacity planning, cloud cost optimisation, and technical debt reduction
- Ensure financial discipline in all infrastructure decisions (Cloud Financial Management mindset)
DevOps & Operational Excellence
- Embed CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and SRE principles
- Define and track SLAs/SLOs
- Lead incident management and root cause processes
- Build resilient DR and business continuity capabilities
Cloud & Messaging Platforms
- Lead GCP infrastructure operations (compute, storage, networking, IAM)
- Maintain multi-cloud capability (GCP/AWS)
Leadership & Culture
- Lead and develop a 25-person global team
- Drive a shift from reactive ticket-taking to proactive business partnership
- Operate in a federated model with dotted-line reporting into business domains
- Manage UK/onshore and Bangalore/offshore dynamics effectively
What We’re Looking For
This is a people leadership role first and foremost. We are not seeking a hands-on technologist who wants to experiment with the latest tools — we need a leader who delivers business outcomes.
Essential Experience
- 10+ years in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or platform operations
- Proven experience leading DevOps transformation in large-scale environments
- GCP expertise (AWS transferable)
- Experience operating high-volume, low-latency systems (e.g. gaming, betting, trading, fintech)
- Strong Kafka and database production experience
- Experience in regulated industries, ideally financial services
- Global team leadership experience
Mindset & Approach
- Business-first orientation: every initiative must map to strategic objectives
- Comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs (launch and iterate vs perfection)
- Commercially aware — understands cloud cost and avoids unnecessary over-engineering
- Calm under pressure; experienced in major incident leadership
- Prefers dynamic, high-growth environments over slow, bureaucratic corporates
Ideal Background
- Financial services or fintech
- Mission-critical environments where downtime materially impacts revenue
- Experience across corporate banking or SaaS businesses
- Exposure to real-time streaming and event-driven architectures
- Experience working with offshore teams (particularly India)
Why Apply?
This is a high-impact leadership role with immediate visibility. The infrastructure team is already in place — the opportunity is to elevate it, modernise it, and make it a trusted, business-aligned capability within a global organisation.