Head of Data Security Protection Operations

Head of Data Protection

The Head of Data Protection provides senior leadership and accountability for operational data protection controls, ensuring consistent, effective protection of sensitive and personal data across the enterprise. The role closes gaps in control consistency, remediation quality, and strategic planning across data protection technologies and processes.

• Own and coordinate enterprise data protection requirements, ensuring controls operate consistently across all data states and egress channels.
• Lead Data Protection Operations, including encryption, DLP, data scanning, obfuscation, and protection tooling.
• Define and maintain the data protection control roadmap, addressing gaps in coverage, scalability, and strategic planning.
• Understanding of Data Security Posture Management Solution
• Improve the quality, timeliness, and consistency of remediation for data protection control failures.
• Provide senior oversight of DLP Operations, trend analysis, and rule optimisation across channels.
• Ensure alignment between governance expectations (2
  
  LoD) and operational execution (1
  
  LoD).
• Partner closely with Data Security Governance to ensure operational controls meet defined standards and policies.

• Lead Data Protection Operations SMEs, DLP Leads, and Analysts across locations.
• Establish sustainable BAU capability, reducing dependency on MSPs and ad‑hoc support models.
• Drive continuous improvement through control performance metrics and operational insight.

To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross‑functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high‑quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimise product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long‑term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid‑level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organisation.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organisation by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.

• 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 with relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the…