Group Data Director

Company Description

At QIMA, we are on a mission to offer our clients smart solutions to make products you can trust. Operating in over 100 countries, we serve the consumer products, food, and life sciences industries and help more than 30,000 brands, retailers, manufacturers, and growers achieve quality excellence. We combine on-the-ground expertise with digital solutions that bring accuracy, transparency and intelligence for quality and compliance data.

What sets us apart is our unique culture. Our 6,000 Qimates live and make decisions every day by our QIMA Values. With client passion, integrity, and a commitment to making things simple, we disrupted the Testing, Inspection, and Certification industry. Are you ready to hop on this exciting ride with us and help us achieve our mission?

QIMA is creating the Group Data Director - a new position, the first time the company names one person with real decision rights over its shared data.

The mandate exists for one reason: turn data governance into business value, never into a compliance exercise for its own sake. Every initiative you launch must trace to a named business outcome it unlocks - better customer insight, faster and more trustworthy reporting, new revenue opportunities. If it doesn't move the needle, it doesn't make the roadmap.

You will chair the Data Steer Co, with Commercial and Finance represented, and work hand-in-hand with business experts, data owners, and our Data Analytics engineering team. You will own the customer data model end to end and hold binding arbitration authority.

You report to the CPTO while the function is built, with a reporting-line review targeted in 2027 as the role matures. This is a growth path: the mandate is designed to expand into full enterprise data governance.

If you want to build a function from scratch, hold real decision rights, and turn data into measurable business value, we'd love to hear from you.

• Decision Rights, Anchored in Impact:
  Hold binding decision rights on shared data definitions and master data standards - a first for QIMA. Arbitrate cross-team disputes. Chair the Data Steer Co. Every decision must unlock a named business outcome: governance for value, never governance for its own sake.
• Unified Customer View:
  Own the unified customer view end to end, replacing fragmented, system-specific customer records with one reliable view - unlocking accurate growth and retention tracking, and stronger cross-sell. Deliver in stages, proving value within 90 days, with reporting continuity guaranteed throughout.
• Master Data & Shared Definitions:
  Define and maintain the ontologies, taxonomies, and reference data that QIMA's systems currently define differently. Sequence the work by business urgency and risk, not by theoretical completeness. Name the accountable owner for every critical field.
• Internal Data Products:
  Own delivery of QIMA's core internal data products (Customer single source of truth, Service Catalogue, semantic layer) as investments with a business case, funded through the appropriate ROI forum (Product or Rev Ops), with clear SLAs to the teams that consume them. Client-facing value propositions and recommendations remain with Product.
• Change Control & Impact Analysis:
  Work closely with product teams to ensure new features and system workflows are designed to capture data correctly at the source — right structure, right granularity, right moment. Challenge design decisions (free text vs. controlled list, optional vs. required, field naming) before they ship. Partner with our Data Analytics engineering team on end-to-end data lineage, to assess and communicate the business impact of any data model change before it ships, so decisions get made ahead of the disruption, not after.
• Stakeholder Adoption:
  Be the accountable owner, not the coordinator, for business experts, Data Owners, Rev Ops, and engineering. Shift the organization from “my system, my definitions” to one shared standard, earned by the value it unlocks.
• Lead-to-Cash Data Seam:
  Own the data connections across the lead-to-cash chain, partnering with Rev Ops and Finance as process sponsors, so…