Head of Data Technologies & Platforms

Base

Location:

You'll be expected to spend 50% of your working week in one of the following locations:
Reading, Havant, London, Perth or Glasgow

Salary: £80,700 - £121,100 + car/car allowance + performance-related bonus + a range of benefits to support your finances, wellbeing and family.

Working Pattern: Permanent | Full Time | Flexible First options available

SSE is strengthening the enterprise data foundations that support resilient operations, better decisions and future growth. As Head of Data Technologies & Platforms, you will lead the group-wide technology capability behind data, analytics, data science, digital twin, data management and information management. You will shape, provide and operate secure, resilient and cost-effective enterprise platforms and services, setting the strategy for instances and tenancies, validating technologies for enterprise adoption and making common capability easier for Business Units to use.

Business Unit teams will administer and use their instances within agreed guardrails, while retaining accountability for their priorities, data products and business outcomes.

• Set and execute SSE’s enterprise data technology and platform roadmap, modernising the landscape, reducing duplication and balancing common foundations with justified Business Unit requirements.
• Lead the design, provisioning and enterprise configuration of data platform capabilities across data lakes and lakehouse, storage and processing, ingestion and integration, insight and visualisation, data science, digital twin, data management and information management tooling.
• Own the enterprise lifecycle of platforms from evaluation and validation through adoption, release, capacity management and retirement, including the instance and tenancy strategy for each platform.
• Deliver reliable, secure and resilient production services through strong Platform Engineering, Data Ops and Dev Sec Ops  practices, with clear service levels, observability, release management, recovery and operating boundaries with Business Units and suppliers.
• Establish reusable platform services, embedded security and automated governance controls that accelerate delivery, improve interoperability and enable Business Unit teams to administer and use their instances within clear enterprise guardrails.
• Lead group-wide commercial and financial management of the data technology estate, providing transparent platform costs and optimising licensing, enterprise capacity, cloud consumption, supplier performance and total cost of ownership.
• Build a strong Platform and Data Ops community across SSE, using adoption, reliability, user experience, cost and operational performance to continually improve the enterprise service portfolio.

• Significant senior leadership experience building or materially reshaping enterprise data, cloud, engineering platform or equivalent technology services in a large, complex organisation.
• Deep practical experience designing, provisioning and operating modern cloud and hybrid data platforms and services in production, including Platform Engineering, Data Ops, Dev Sec Ops , observability, resilience and service management.
• Broad and credible experience across data platforms, integration, analytics and visualisation, data science and digital twin technologies, data management and information management tooling, and platform automation.
• A strong record of establishing common enterprise services, setting instance and tenancy strategies, rationalising technology estates and managing migrations while enabling justified Business Unit needs.
• Experience embedding security, privacy, compliance and automated data and information governance controls into platform design, provisioning and operation.
• Strong…