Director of Data
We are looking for a visionary, business-focused Director of Data to transform our data ecosystem into a high-performing, organization-wide asset. In this role, you will be taking full ownership of our end-to-end strategy, rollout, and organizational data usage. Our engineering and analytics teams have an excellent capability to deliver; your mission is to provide the cohesive, shared roadmap that guides them. You will transition our data department from a reactive "service-provider" model driven by ad-hoc stakeholder requests into a proactive, product-oriented capability. Acting as the ultimate data advocate, you will bridge the gap between technical execution and commercial business growth. This role operates on a hybrid model, requiring you to be on-site at our London offices one day a week. We are moving away from descriptive reporting and manual raw data adjustments toward a scalable, automated ecosystem where data is a primary driver of product development and revenue. You will lead the charge in auditing and streamlining our current fragmented BI tool landscape (Looker and PowerBI) to define a unified tooling strategy. Ultimately, you will build a single source of truth that allows stakeholders across Finance, Marketing, Commercial, and Engineering to confidently make data-driven decisions and leverage first-party customer data to personalize fan experiences.
- Manage and unite our teams. Champion their evolution into a high-performing, product-oriented data unit with a clear roadmap that balances resolving technical debt with high-impact business wins.
- Move the business from descriptive reporting toward predictive and prescriptive insights, empowering cross-functional stakeholders with intuitive, self-service data options.
- Partner with Product and Engineering teams to ensure data tracking is baked into features from day one. You will hold the authority to halt product launches if data telemetry is insufficient, ensuring we never "drive without a speedometer."
- Formulate and execute a clear path forward for our analytics stack. You will evaluate our current parallel usage of Looker and PowerBI and decide whether to consolidate, integrate, or replace them.
- Standardise key global KPIs and create a coherent business metric dictionary across all regional departments so "the truth" is identical for everyone.
- Collaborate with Commercial, Marketing, and Finance leaders to future-proof revenue streams by leading our strategic shift from 3rd-party to 1st-party customer data, improving revenue attribution and audience cohort segmentation.
- 10+ Years of Data Leadership: Proven experience leading data engineering, analytics, and business intelligence teams in a fast-paced digital environment. (required)
- Strategic & Business-First Mindset: You are an executive leader who focuses on business outcomes, strategy, and cross-functional advocacy, rather than functioning as a full-time coder. (required)
- Core Technical Literacy: While you won't be building pipelines yourself, you possess strong cloud architecture awareness (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, AWS) and are fully comfortable running basic SQL queries to understand and validate our data foundations. (required)
- Change Management & Consolidation: A track record of migrating legacy tech stacks, defining global governance standards, and cleaning up tool fragmentation (specifically within Looker/PowerBI ecosystems). (required)
- Stakeholder & Political Management: Exceptional leadership skills with the ability to manage C-suite expectations, navigate complex organisational dynamics, and influence engineering and commercial behaviours. (required)
- Experience in high-volume consumer tech, sports media, or iGaming environments. (nice-to-have)
- Familiarity with data landscape changes during corporate Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). (nice-to-have)
- Exposure to or strong interest in AI/LLM integrations for building "conversational" data query interfaces for non-technical users. (nice-to-have)
- Subsidised Sky HD package, broadband and discounted sky talk
- Free Puregym membership
- Free healthcare with Bupa, life assurance and income protection
- Pension scheme with up to 9% contribution from the company
- £1,000 training fund each financial year, to spend on your professional development
- Unlimited holiday plan
FairPlay Sports Media is a global sports media network that builds and engages communities of sports fans and bettors to create value for its betting, advertising and media partners. Previously known as Oddschecker Global Media, it rebranded in 2024 and traces its origins to oddschecker, which launched in 1999. Its portfolio includes oddschecker, WhoScored, vime, the Confido Network and CasinoSmash, processing around 100 million data updates per week and reaching over 100 million unique users monthly. Headquartered in London, the group works with more than 100 partners worldwide.
