Programme Manager – Data Retention Transformation; FTC

Our purpose is to give everyone real confidence to put their money to work. With a heritage dating back more than 175 years, we have a long history of innovation in savings and investments, combining asset management and insurance expertise to offer a wide range of solutions.

Our two distinct operating segments, Asset Management and Life, work together to provide access to balanced, long-term investment and savings solutions.

Through telling it like it is, owning it now, and moving it forward together with care and integrity; we are creating an exceptional place to work for exceptional talent.

We will consider flexible working arrangements for any of our roles and also offer work place accommodations to ensure you have what you need to effectively deliver in your role.

M&G Life serves over 5 million customers and manages more than £300bn in assets. As part of our modernisation and control‑strengthening agenda, we are delivering two of our most critical change initiatives: the Data Retention Programme and the Data Products Programme. Together, these programmes will reduce operational risk, improve data hygiene, enable future digital capability, and ensure we meet evolving regulatory expectations.

We’re looking for a Programme Manager to lead this large, complex, multi‑year transformation. You’ll oversee delivery across Group, Life, Technology, Data, Risk and Legal — creating a unified and sustainable approach to data retention and scalable data products. You’ll set the standard for programme discipline, governance and pace, giving the organisation confidence that data is managed, controlled and retired safely and transparently.

This role is ideal for a senior delivery leader who can operate as a trusted partner to executives, bring clarity to complex technical and regulatory requirements, manage third‑party providers, and lead multidisciplinary teams. You will play a pivotal role in strengthening our operational resilience and building the data foundations that underpin customer trust and future digital strategy.

• Lead the end‑to‑end delivery of a large, multi‑year Data Retention and Data Products programmes, ensuring predictable execution, strong governance and alignment to enterprise priorities.
• Translate regulatory, legal and risk requirements into executable plans across data, technology, platform and business change.

• Engage and influence senior leaders across Life, Technology, Data, Risk, Legal, Finance and Operations; provide concise, data‑led updates to Steer Co/Board forums.
• Drive timely enterprise trade‑offs; remove ambiguity and cut through blockers.

• Lead high‑value partner ecosystems (SI, tooling vendors, managed services) across data classification, archival/deletion, lineage and storage platforms.
• Set clear deliverables, SLAs and acceptance criteria; coordinate integration, non‑functional requirements, security and compliance; hold suppliers to account on scope, quality, cost and timelines.
• Ensure commercial discipline (contracts, SoWs, change control) and seamless collaboration with internal engineering, architecture and data governance teams.

• Orchestrate change across legacy estates, cloud platforms, warehouses, document stores and business processes; manage impacts to Operations, Distribution, CMO, Finance and Claims.
• Land scalable retention solutions (classification, lifecycle tooling, metadata uplift, automated deletion) with measurable control improvements.

• Operate within Change Risk Appetite: surface risks early, agree mitigations, avoid end‑cycle surprises; provide clean evidence for Risk, Audit and Assurance partners.
• Maintain sharp, value‑adding governance and executive‑ready reporting.

• Apply the right delivery approach (Agile/Waterfall/hybrid) for regulatory and data complexity; drive continuous improvement and efficient sequencing.
• Lead and develop Project Managers, BAs, Data SMEs and PMO; set a culture of…