DataOps Lead

Data Operations Manager - Contract Role

Outside IR35 | £600-650/day | London | Hybrid | Initial 6 months

We're supporting a global financial services client in building a brand-new Data Operations function to support their AWS-based data platform. With the team currently scaling, this role will be pivotal in shaping how data quality, SLAs, monitoring, and operational excellence are delivered across their platform.

This is a hands-on leadership position where you'll build processes, own data reliability, and eventually grow a globally distributed team (UK, India, US). The environment is fast-paced, high-impact, and ideal for someone that is still hands on but wants to step up into a strategic operational leadership role.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and build a new Data Operations function supporting the firm's AWS data platform.
• Oversee data quality, validation, SLA monitoring, and data reconciliation processes.
• Own 1st-2nd line investigations into data issues (late/missing feeds, schema changes, accuracy checks).
• Develop operational processes, incident playbooks, runbooks, and workflow improvements.
• Work closely with upstream vendors and downstream engineering, analytics, and business stakeholders.
• Establish monitoring and alerting practices (Grafana) and improve operational reliability (MTTD/MTTR).
• Drive automation, process optimisation, and standardisation across the data life cycle.
• Hire, manage, and coordinate offshore team members in India and the US as the function scales.
• Collaborate with the Head of Data, Data Architects, and Engineering leads globally.

Ideal Candidate

• 5-8+ years in Data Operations, Data Support, or Data Content Ops, ideally within financial services.
• Experience running or scaling operational data functions.
• Strong understanding of data pipelines, ingestion, transformations, and quality frameworks.
• Confident working directly with data (validation, reconciliation, tracing issues, platform behaviour).
• Excellent communicator capable of interfacing with technical and business stakeholders globally.
• Self-starter who enjoys building capability from the ground up and improving process maturity.
• Ambitious candidate seeking a clear Pathway to future leadership and team ownership.

Tech Stack Required:

• SQL (strong)
• AWS (S3, Athena, Iceberg)
• DBT
• Grafana (monitoring/observability)
• Scripting in Python

If you are interested please apply below!