Executive Director for Data Infrastructure and Skills

Job Description

SALARY: £94,931 - £117,800 (plus £5,560 London allowance) per annum

HOURS:

Full Time or Part Time (minimum 0.8 FTE)

CONTRACT TYPE:
Open Ended (permanent) or Secondments welcome

LOCATION:

Caxton House, London or Polaris House Swindon (Hybrid)

GRADE: UKRI Band X

POSITIONS AVAILABLE: 1

CLOSING DATE: 15 February 2026

PROPOSED INTERVIEW DATE: W/C 09 & 16 March 2026

This role has been re-advertised under the Research Programme and Funding Management job category to better reflect the social sciences nature of this position. A change of location has also been implemented to outline that successful candidates will have the opportunity to be based at either our Swindon or London offices.

We are seeking a dynamic, creative social science research leader with standing in the profession who thrives on making a difference in the science community, turning complex challenges into opportunities. It’s your chance to influence how new and existing social science data infrastructure are positioned as core national infrastructures to support the delivery of government priorities, including the industrial strategy. Also, to influence the development of talent and skills related to social and economic research are nurtured and deployed.

• Data infrastructure leadership across social science domains with a track record of building bridges between disciplinary fields to unlock transformative research outcomes.
• Research delivery experience drawn from universities, institutes, or research centres, where you can show credible, impactful results.
• Entrepreneurial vision that sees challenges as catalysts for innovation.
• A collaborative and engaged mindset, working as part of our executive team to exemplify credible, empathetic and effective leadership of ESRC’s workforce and diverse partners.

• Strategic influence across the research and policy landscape with a deep understanding of ESRC’s social science data infrastructures as its foundation.
• National presence as ESRC’s authoritative voice on the value of our data infrastructure and skills investments and responsibility for senior liaison across the UK’s research ecosystem.
• Direct engagement across university and national research organisations in relation to data infrastructures, talent and skills.
• Leading role in ensuring ESRC’s data infrastructures support the delivery of impactful research that helps inform the nation’s social and economic future.

As ESRC Executive Director responsible for data infrastructures and skills you will play a key leadership role at the heart of the executive team, ensuring our data infrastructure and skills investments support impactful research that informs decisions about the economy, public service delivery and society over the next decade. The role has direct responsibility for all ESRC budget lines related to data infrastructures, talent and skills funding, ensuring that outcomes align with UKRI’s priorities, and that ESRC keeps pace with evolving social science data needs, technological changes (including the use of AI techniques) and computational capabilities.

It will be important to seek out opportunities to create funding and collaboration partnerships with other research councils, UK government departments and the devolved governments, for example in relation to other major data infrastructure investments. You will need to command esteem and pro-actively engage across ESRC’s social science community, both to keep pace with their insights on new developments in the data infrastructure and skills landscapes and to communicate ESRC’s agenda, particularly to senior leaders.

You will join a strongly collaborative executive team, working closely with ESRC’s Directors to ensure that data infrastructure, talent and skills priorities are coherent and optimised across all programmes and are reflected in the ESRC Data Infrastructure and Skills strategy.

Reporting directly to the ESRC Executive Chair you will be the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) for:

• The Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) programme, which has recently received approval of £168m for the next…