Associate Distinguished Engineer - Senior Data Leader

About the role

We are looking for a senior data leader who has built enterprise data platforms, master data management and semantic layers at real scale - more than once - and who can sit across the table from client data leadership as a thinking partner in the morning and be in the modelling detail with the delivery team that afternoon. This is not an advisory role with a delivery team attached. It is a hands-on leadership role with a seat at the strategy table.

Qualifications & Requirements

Experience & Leadership 15+ years in data, with the last several in senior architecture or data leadership roles At least two MDM programmes taken to production, with genuine accountability for match, merge and survivorship decisions - not oversight of someone else's. This is the requirement we weight most heavily.

At least three enterprise data platform builds delivered end to end at large, complex organisations - multi-business-unit, multi-region, heterogeneous source estates Demonstrable experience designing and landing a semantic layer or shared business ontology that survived contact with more than one business unit A track record of making the case for foundation work to executive stakeholders - and holding that sequencing when the pressure is to jump straight to use cases Experience in environments where data arrived through acquisition and accretion rather than design Technology Depth We expect real, current, hands-on depth here - not familiarity.

Cloud Data Platform Snowflake to a deep level - architecture, performance, cost, governance, data sharing MDM Reltio in production, or equivalent enterprise MDM (Informatica, Stibo, Tamr) with a clear view on where Reltio fits Governance & Catalog Collibra - catalog, lineage, policy, workflow, and how to drive adoption rather than shelfware Data Quality Soda, Great Expectations or equivalent, implemented as enforced controls in the pipeline Cloud AWS and Google Cloud - hands-on, both, with a view on when each is the right answer Modelling & Pipelines Dimensional and data-vault modelling dbt Orchestration Streaming and batch The strongest candidates tend to have stories like these.

You have retired something - a legacy warehouse, a duplicate MDM stack, a reporting layer nobody would let go of - and you can explain how you got the organisation to agree. You have sat in a room with two business owners who defined the same entity differently, and landed a survivorship decision that both could live with.

• You can explain the difference between a data catalog and a semantic layer to a CFO, in terms of what each one changes about their week.
• You have turned down or deferred a use case because the underlying data was not ready - and were proved right.
• Your second domain, second market or second use case was meaningfully faster than your first, and you can say precisely why.