Head of Data Platforms, IG Group
+ Performance-related bonuses & LTIP
3 days a week in office (Cannon Street, London)
The UK's No.1 trading provider
Job no longer available
The UK's No.1 trading provider
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
+ Performance-related bonuses & LTIP
3 days a week in office (Cannon Street, London)
1001+ employees
Company mission
We challenge anything that holds investors back.
Role
Who you are
- A dynamic and ambitious leader who demonstrates a level of gravitas commensurate with a senior leadership role, while also being able to engage effectively at all levels of the organisation
- Provides clear vision and direction, inspiring and engaging individuals and the team to deliver excellence
- Demonstrates sound and pragmatic judgement, balancing pace, risk and business value to reach decisions which are well informed, rigorous and actionable
- Leads with determination and drive, taking initiative willingly, acting with both sensitivity and self-assurance to achieve results
- Respects individuals’ views and positively encourages and contributes to a learning environment in which individuals are supported to develop to their full potential and excel in role
- Establishes and maintains effective working relationships and influence with key stakeholders based on professional credibility and excellent communication and engagement
- Highly structured thinker, able to define how to approach the business question and execute appropriate analysis
- Likely background experience
- Championed a data-as-a-product operating model, introducing product management principles to data pipelines, platforms, and services
- Led the end-to-end delivery of reusable data products, including customer 360 views, ML feature stores, and real-time analytics layers
- Established data product ownership roles and SLAs, enhancing trust and adoption of data assets across business units
- Built cross-functional squads to deliver domain-specific data products aligned with business outcomes and federated governance principles (inspired by Data Mesh)
- Designed productized data APIs and self-serve interfaces, enabling internal teams to consume data with minimal engineering support
- Implemented usage analytics and feedback loops to continuously improve data products based on user adoption and impact metrics
- Experience in running multinational, distributed data teams at scale
- A proven track record of creating, adapting, and developing a growing data practice focused on outcomes
- Demonstrable experience in developing and executing data strategies that have driven real value in the organisations they serve
- Excellent communication skills with a proven ability to influence senior leadership
- Excellent understanding and working knowledge of modern data architecture, including databases, data lakes, warehouses, and pipelines
- Experience in designing, implementing, and running data platforms in public and private cloud – GCP and/or AWS (former is preferred)
- Strong experience with some of the following languages and data technologies: Java, Python, SQL, Confluent Kafka, Apache Spark, Apache Beam, REST, Spring, Spring boot, Apache Tomcat, JMS, Gitlab and DBT
What the job involves
- The Data department is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining datasets, as well as the end-to-end data platform, to meet the data needs of the business
- The fundamental objective is to ensure the quality and trust of data, empowering data practitioners within the business and technology, through the implementation of data standards, policies and principles. This function plays a crucial role in helping accelerate IG on its journey to becoming a data-enabled organisation
- The Chief Data Officer is a senior technology role reporting to the CTO of Enterprise Technology Services. IG’s data capabilities are a mixture of on-prem and off-prem services, and as such the role requires strong partnerships with several external vendors. As a member of the Extended Technology Leadership Team the role demands excellent interpersonal, leadership and stakeholder collaboration skills
- Establishing and maintaining the departmental vision and culture
- Designing, implementing, and advancing capabilities to better discover and exploit our data assets
- Collaborate with department heads to ensure a strategic and integrated use of data across the organisation
- Establishing the processes to define how data quality targets are achieved, delivering trusted data to support the group strategy
- Data ownership governance and maintaining data standards, policies, and principles
- Delivery of a modern data platform architecture and infrastructure, collaborating with technical and system experts to optimise data management
- Continually assess and improve our legacy data position
- Operational fitness a (EOL, Incidents, problems, vulnerabilities, security etc) Ensuring the day-to-day technology services within the Client Technology domain are fit for purpose and aligned to the overall IG risk appetite and are yielding the desired results for our clients
- Build an effective and motivational team environment, aligning behaviours, values and performance expectations across the function
- Sustain a high degree of employee engagement throughout the teams and embed a culture of continuous improvement, thereby enabling a step-change in performance
- Deploy appropriate talent development strategies to ensure the best possible talent pipeline for now and the future
- Works as part of the Extended IT Leadership Team to achieve collective success for IG IT and helps shape and develop long term direction of the function
- Ensure effective communication at all levels both internally and externally, providing briefings to all team members on business strategies, performance and priorities
- Shares accountability and decision-making for direction of IG’s IT as a critical business unit for the Group
- Foster a culture of modern working practices within the Data Engineering department
- Instil the culture of continuous improvement and automation into the infrastructure Teams
- Create and nurture a "data as a service" for IG Group, enabling line of business functions to efficiently consume shared services
- Drive a culture of engineering and innovation within technology
- Maintain the currency, functionality and affordability of the group’s Data Technology, ensuring a multiyear roadmap is in place that develops the infrastructure to deliver the Group Data Strategy
- Deliver a multi-year change roadmap via an ongoing annual portfolio of change projects, successfully delivered to time, quality and cost
- Manage the Opex and Capex budgets for the department. Ensure budgets are planned appropriately and met within the financial year
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Founded in 1974 by Stuart Wheeler as a UK-based spread betting company for gold, IG Group, abbreviated from Investors Gold Index, was initially set up to allow people to speculate and trade on the price change of gold without owning physical gold. And in the year 2000, it was listed on the London Stock Exchange and its gradual evolution into the world of fintech began.
By 2011, the company had played a part in numerous international buyouts before narrowing its focus down to financial wagers. During the latter half of that decade, IG shut down its binary options trading platform and focused instead on building an investment portfolio with partner BlackRock Investments, all whilst maintaining its Forex and CFD trading processes. Since then, it has become a fast-paced market leader in the investment space.
In recent years, IG Group has developed major platforms for various trading actions and has grown profit and revenue significantly. Alongside this it has acquired a number of companies, including tastytrade and Freetrade, and launched its own crypto product, making it the first UK-listed company to launch crypto trading to retail investors. This further proves how much of a staple IG Group is in the world of financial trading.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company values
- Think big
- Deliver at pace
- Raise the bar
- Lead and inspire
- Champion the client
Company HQ
City of London, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Breon Corcoran
(Group CEO)Joined IG Group as CEO in January 2024. Prior to this, they were the CEO of WorldRemit and a Non-Executive Director at Tilney Group.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at IG Group
- Employee-led LGBTQ+, Women’s, Black and Parents & Carers networks with an annual budget for organising events & projects that foster an open, diverse and inclusive culture.
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