Head of Data Infrastructure & Operations

📢 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.

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:

• Database platforms (Mongo
  
  DB and others)
• Cloud infrastructure (GCP primary, AWS secondary)
• Data platform operations supporting EU, USA, and Australia

The environment is fast-moving and outcome-driven. Success is measured by reliability, speed to value, cost control, and business trust — not technical experimentation.

• 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)

• 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
• Lead GCP infrastructure operations (compute, storage, networking, IAM)
• Maintain multi-cloud capability (GCP/AWS)
• Oversee high-throughput Kafka environments
• Manage Mongo
  
  DB and other database platforms

• 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

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.

• 10+ years in infrastructure engineering, Dev Ops, or platform operations
• Proven experience leading Dev Ops 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

• 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

• 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)

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.