Senior Systems Manager - Data
Application Deadline: 29 June 2026
Department: IT and Business Systems
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Silverstone
Description
As Senior Systems Manager for Data at Silverstone Circuits, you will be the founder member of our new data team and will lead and support the shaping of this key new capability for Silverstone. You will be responsible for the engineering and governance of our Datalake while acting as a business partner and change advocate, ensuring Silverstone can use data effectively.
You'll bridge technical solutions with commercial objectives, drive data driven transformation, educate stakeholders, and manage high performing data capability to support a data culture across Silverstone and its stakeholder groups, including promoting practical AI literacy in tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Claude.
Key Responsibilities Data & Platform Engineering
- Build and evolve a scalable, secure data platform integrating key sources including ticketing systems, CRM, web analytics, event operations, and finance.
- Design for interoperability and timely data availability (batch and near real time) to support both operational reporting and advanced analytics.
- Assure data quality and integrity through automated validation, monitoring, and issue management across the full data lifecycle.
- Own platform reliability, performance, and cost management, including capacity planning and optimisation of storage/compute.
- Establish operational processes for incident management, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and environment governance (dev/test/prod).
- Develop and maintain common data models and curated datasets to enable self service BI and consistent KPI definitions.
Data Governance & Compliance
- Implement governance frameworks for data quality, security, access control, retention, and GDPR compliance.
- Define clear roles and responsibilities for data stewardship across business units, including ownership of key datasets and KPIs.
- Maintain a data catalogue and business glossary to improve discoverability, lineage transparency, and consistent terminology.
- Lead privacy, security, and risk reviews for new data use cases, ensuring appropriate controls and auditability are in place.
Business Engagement & Strategy
- Act as the primary liaison between technical teams and business units, translating commercial goals into data and platform capabilities.
- Lead workshops and stakeholder sessions to define outcomes and requirements, prioritise initiatives, and quantify the business value and success measures.
- Present architecture roadmaps, investment cases, and transformation plans to senior leadership, influencing decisions and securing sponsorship.
- Partner with functional leaders to identify high impact use cases (fan experience, commercial performance, operations) and shape a pragmatic delivery roadmap.
- Apply a product mindset: manage a prioritised backlog, align stakeholders on trade offs, and track benefits realisation against agreed KPIs.
- Collaborate with vendors and internal partners to ensure solution design, delivery, and support arrangements meet Silverstone standards.
Change Management
- Champion data driven change initiatives, ensuring smooth adoption of new tooling, processes, and ways of working.
- Develop and execute change management strategies, including stakeholder impact assessments, communications, training, and readiness planning.
- Monitor adoption and value delivered using agreed measures, and run feedback loops to continuously improve engagement and outcomes.
- Create and maintain stakeholder maps, change plans, and communications calendars aligned to key business milestones and events.
- Define and embed new operating processes (request intake, prioritisation, release management) so teams can sustain change beyond delivery.
- Build a network of business champions and super users to accelerate adoption and act as local points of contact.
Education & Enablement
- Design and deliver training programmes, knowledge sessions, and documentation covering data literacy, self service analytics, and platform usage.
- Act as a trusted advisor, helping stakeholders understand data concepts, make informed decisions, and define questions that analytics can answer.
- Establish standards and templates for dashboards, reports, and KPI definitions to improve consistency and trust in insights.
- Run regular office hours and a support model for questions, coaching, and continuous improvement of self service capability.
- Build a data community of practice to share best practice, success stories, and reusable assets across teams.
- Promote AI literacy across the business, including practical and responsible use of tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Claude to improve productivity, insight generation, and decision making.
- Establish policies for third party and stakeholder data sharing, including contracts, data minimisation, and consent where applicable.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
- Technical Expertise: MS Fabric, Power BI, data modelling, SQL, Python, ETL tools, cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP), and working knowledge of AI productivity tools including Microsoft Copilot and Claude.
- Data Governance & Quality: Strong understanding of data governance frameworks, data quality management, stewardship, lineage, and controls to ensure trusted, compliant, and well managed data.
- Business Engagement: Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Education: Ability to design and deliver training programs for diverse audiences, including AI literacy and responsible use of Microsoft Copilot and Claude.
- Team Leadership: Proven experience in building and managing data teams.
- Soft Skills: Influencing, facilitation, and relationship building.
Ideal Candidate
You are a data expert and change agent who thrives in stakeholder facing roles. You can articulate technical concepts in business language, lead transformation initiatives, build strong relationships, and empower the organization through education.