Job Description Purpose of the role Seeking a Senior Director in Glasgow to lead Data Operations responsible for the full data lifecycle from data hydration to curation and ensuring that data products are safe, reliable, and business‑ready in production. This is an SRE Data leadership position that brings engineering discipline to how data products are onboarded, released, monitored, and operated at scale. Lead will own the full data operations lifecycle: from early‑stage product onboarding and go‑live guard‑rails, through release management and change control, and support of critical data products.
The Lead will manage a team of DataOps engineers performing hydration, ingestion, and curation, and partner closely with CIO, Data and Platform Engineering, CDO, and Business stakeholders.
Accountabilities
Own end‑to‑end data pipeline strategy, from source system ingestion to curated, analytics‑ready layers with monitoring, alerting and reporting for the senior stakeholders.
Enforce data quality frameworks, SLAs, and observability standards across all data products and reference data as defined by CDO.
Partner with Data Engineering and Platform teams to architect a scalable, reliable pipeline infrastructure ensuring data timeliness and freshness.
Lead, mentor, and grow a team of DataOps engineers across data hydration, ingestion, and curation functions.
Drive automation and tooling improvements to reduce manual toil and increase pipeline reliability.
Establish and maintain data governance practices including lineage, cataloging, and metadata management.
Build and track operational KPIs: pipeline freshness, error rates, data coverage, and resolution SLAs.
Drive DataOps agentic delivery with a goal to reimagine data; AI/ML to detect trends, patterns and potential risks.
Collaborate with Analytics and Business Intelligence teams to ensure data meets downstream consumption needs.
Provide centralized reporting for all Data Products and Reference data operational metrics (Open incidents, SLA breaches).
Proactively manage and address issues (identify, notify and resolve) via Observability/Monitoring tools.
Manage vendor relationships, tooling evaluations, and infrastructure spend within budget.
Recruit, interview, and onboard DataOps talent with a plan to upskill current enterprise platform and central DataOps teams.
Director Expectations
To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide. They manage the direction of a large team or sub‑function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross‑functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long‑term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions. Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub‑function. Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately. Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed and that relevant processes are in place to facilitate adherence. Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate. Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division Group to achieve the overall business objectives. Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up‑to‑date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives. Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations. Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area. Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally. Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions. Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division. All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others. All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.
Required Qualifications
* 10+ years in data engineering and data operations
* 6+ years managing and growing multi‑person data or platform teams
* Proven experience operating data products in production with SLA accountability (freshness, completeness, availability)
* Strong understanding of data ingestion patterns: batch, streaming, CDC, and API‑based pipelines
* Experience establishing change management and release governance for data systems
* Hands‑on proficiency in SQL and at least one transformation framework (dbt, Spark, or equivalent)
* Experience with cloud data platforms; Snowflake, Big Query, Databricks, or Redshift
* Demonstrated ability to build operational standards: runbooks, data contracts, SLO definitions
* Strong stakeholder communication skills and able to translate data reliability issues for non‑technical audiences
Preferred Qualifications
* Background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or platform operations applied to data systems
* Experience with data observability tooling (Observe, Astronomer, CloudWatch)
* Familiarity with data catalog and lineage platforms (Alation, Immuta, Datahub, Open Metadata, Mesh and Catalogue)
* Experience with data mesh, data product ownership models, and data governance
* Exposure to data hydration workflows: entity enrichment, reference data management, third‑party data integration
* Knowledge of ITIL or equivalent service management frameworks applied in a data context
Skills and Technologies
* Cloud Data Platforms: Snowflake, Databricks, AWS/Azure, Redshift
* Pipeline and Orchestration: Airflow, dbt, Kafka
* Reliability: SLA / SLO / SLI, MTTD, MTTR
* Observability: Observe, Grafana, Cloud Watch
* Governance: Alation, Data Hub, Open Metadata, Data Contracts, Lineage
* ITIL: Change Control, Release Management, Incident and Problem Management
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