We are looking for a Head of Data Operations on a 12-month fixed term maternity cover who will play a pivotal role in identifying, planning, developing, and delivering data services and products to meet the needs of the scientific community globally. 

This is a leadership role that involves developing, coaching and directing our data operations team, which includes expert data managers and data scientists. These work as part of multidisciplinary teams alongside data engineers, software engineers, product managers, scientists and delivery leads, and part of your role is to promote coherence between these teams and share learning.

Our Future Health will be the UK’s largest ever health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to detect, prevent and treat diseases. We are a charity, supported by the UK Government, in partnership with charities and industry. We work closely with the NHS and with public authorities across all nations and regions of the UK.

What you’ll be doing

This role will support senior stakeholders to understand how we could improve data quality and reduce the time that it takes for participant data to throw through the end-to-end process. Your key responsibilities will also include but not be limited to:

• Lead efforts to improve quality, speed, and collaboration and promote a culture of continuous improvement across whole data lifecycle from providers to ingestion into TREs (and potentially, further).
• Join technical conversations with providers of data (for example our labs and the NHS) and with Trusted Research Environments at an early stage, help to establish collaborative relationships and clarify requirements. Support others in your team to do the same.
• Support teams in defining and executing data transfer plans between Our Future Health and third parties, ensuring timely data transfer and addressing risks by involving appropriate people across the organisation.
• Coach teams to respond to anomalies in the data and other data quality issues, enabling them to be investigated and resolved, and supporting work to address the underlying technical and procedural issues.
• Mature our data quality management and supporting technical systems and promote consistency between teams.
• Own our systems to support data discoverability and promote high standards in transparency about data.
• Take responsibility for the work of your team to deliver support to researchers within defined SLAs, including responding to requests to bring data and tools into and out of our trusted research environment (our airlock).  Work collaboratively and proactively with our Head of Product to identify ways to scale and improve how we are supporting external researchers to access and use our data.
• Develop our data operations team, providing technical leadership, motivation, and career development to the team.
• Develop technical standards around the processing and sharing of participant data that meet data governance and compliance requirements and can be adhered to, such as our de-identification policy for data releases.   

Requirements

To succeed in this role, you will have some of the following skills and experience:

• Delivery-focused with a strong ability to build and maintain collaborations in ambiguous situations.
• Experienced in hiring, managing, and developing data teams whilst fostering a collaborative, people first environment.
• You can translate between technical and non-technical teams.
• An ability to understand researcher requirements for data, and what makes data useful to researchers.
• Ideally, knowledge of health specific data (e.g. genotyping data or hospital episode statistics) and standards (such as OMOP and Snomed CT).
• You can translate information governance requirements into technical requirements and vice versa.
• You are familiar with data management tools, including metadata and lineage tools (such as Collibra, Microsoft Purview or OpenMetadata).
• You are used to engaging with providers on data-related matters at contract, design and implementation stage.
• You have a track record at building and maintaining systems to manage data across its lifecycle.
• Experienced with AWS, Azure, or GCP, and familiar with Python and SQL.

Benefits

• Competitive basic salary.
• Generous company pension package with employer contributions of up to 12%.
• 30 days annual leave (plus bank holidays).
• Continuous career development with regular appraisals and learning and development opportunities.
• A lovely new office in Holborn, Central London – we offer flexible and remote working arrangements.

Join us - let’s prevent disease together.