Director of Data

About the role

As Data Director at Forto, you will be responsible for creating a unified data organisation consisting of Data Science, Data Analytics and Data Engineering. You will dramatically raise the profile of data across the business, partnering with stakeholders in a number of domains to assess and support their data needs. You will own and implement a company wide data strategy, prioritizing competing demands into one cohesive and well understood approach.

What you'll do

• Be responsible for the teams (each with their own manager/technical lead) that own the 3 "pillars" of data at Forto: Data Engineering, Data Analytics and Data Science, bringing them into a unified org whilst also encouraging and respecting their specialised skills
• Ensure that the Data org operates a Centre of Excellence, supporting and educating the "customers" of data across the business
• Break down siloes and form strong working relationships with stakeholders
• Define and shape a data strategy fit for purpose across our analytical and agentic business needs
• Own data governance and quality. Establish the policies, standards, ownership model, and forums that make data trustworthy. Manage day-to-day compliance with GDPR and emerging AI regulation
• Sponsor the data platform. Work with engineering and architecture to maintain a reliable, performant, cost-aware platform across ingestion, storage, transformation, BI, and ML
• Scale analytics and AI capability. Define how use cases are sourced, prioritised, productionised, and governed
• Partner across the business. Build strong working relationships with leaders in every function and translate technical choices into commercial language

What you'll need

• 7+ years in data, analytics, or related disciplines, including 3+ years leading teams that span more than one sub-discipline
• Has shaped and delivered a data strategy for a business
• Has worked inside, built, or substantially evolved a CoE-style function: service model, hub-and-spoke design, intake and prioritisation
• Strong working knowledge of warehouse/lakehouse patterns, streaming, orchestration, BI, and the basics of GenAI. Cloud platform fluency (AWS / GCP / Azure)
• Hands-on accountability for data governance, quality, and regulatory compliance (GDPR at minimum)
• Experience supporting GenAI usecases and setting a strategy that supports productisation
• Proven ability to partner with department heads and VP-level leaders across functions
• Owns and defends a budget; builds business cases with realistic benefits and ranges of uncertainty; manages vendor relationships pragmatically

Nice to have

• Experience in a high-growth or scale-up environment where the data function had to be built or significantly reshaped
• Background in industries with operational complexity, real-time data needs, or supply chain / logistics / marketplace dynamics
• Hands-on past as a data engineer, analytics engineer, or data scientist
• Experience implementing a data mesh or federated data product model
• Familiarity with EU AI Act and emerging AI governance frameworks
• Graduate qualification in a quantitative, computer science, or related discipline