Head of Data & AI

Head of Data & AI | Azure, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric | Hands-On Seat in a Scaling AI Consultancy

• Salary: £70,000 to £100,000, depending on experience, plus a company-performance bonus
• Location: London, hybrid (around 2-3 days in the office, plus client visits)
• Essential: a consultancy or professional services background

This is a senior data role where you stay on the tools. You'll lead, but you'll also sit down and write the ETLs, model the data and build the pipelines yourself. My client is a London data and AI consultancy, small and flat, working across retail, ecommerce, insurance, education, media and hospitality. They already have someone in this seat and it's working well. Now they want a second, because the client base keeps growing and one person can't cover it all.

You'll report straight to the leadership team, with no layers in between. The work is hands-on and client-facing in equal measure. One day you're designing a lakehouse model in Azure or Databricks, the next you're in front of a client working out what they actually need from their data. You'll have data engineers and software developers alongside you on projects, and as the business grows there's a team here for you to lead.

It's a close group, no hierarchy, everyone in the same room solving things together. You'll be in the London office three days a week, two from home, with the odd client visit on top. This one suits someone who wants to commute in and be part of it, not work fully remote.

What They're Looking For:

• Consultancy or professional services background, juggling several clients at once
• Data governance (definitions, lineage, quality, ownership, access control)
• Data modelling, with a track record of building a single source of truth across messy, multi-source data
• Azure, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric (working in them, not just advising)
• SQL and Python
• Comfortable staying billable and hands-on at a senior level

What You'll Work With:

• Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics
• Microsoft Purview (or a comparable cataloguing and lineage tool)
• Dimensional modelling, Data Vault, warehouse and lakehouse architecture
• ETL and data pipeline design and build
• CoPilot, Claude and OpenAI in day-to-day delivery

Nice to Haves:

• Agentic architecture, putting LLMs to work on real data problems
• Experience across data-sensitive sectors such as insurance or finance
• A track record leading small delivery teams

Why Join?

Two things make this stand out. First, you're trusted with the whole thing. Give them a project, a deadline and a budget, and they leave you to deliver it. Second, you lead and you build in the same week. You'll set the frameworks and standards from scratch, then go and apply them yourself across live client work.

Plenty of variety too: financial rules for one client, stock and inventory for another, a different industry and a different data problem every few weeks. And because the team is small and scaling, the person who does this well grows with it, into leading the data function as the company expands.

Employee Benefits:

• Company-performance bonus, tied to the billable success of the business
• Client travel expensed
• Flexible hybrid, two days from home
• A flat structure with a direct line to the leadership team
• Room to grow into leading the data function as the company scales

If you've got the consultancy background and you're happy staying close to the code, apply and I'll give you a call to talk it through.

Head of Data & AI | Azure, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric | Hands-On Seat in a Scaling AI Consultancy