Transformation Director; Data Science

Are you passionate about transforming data science strategy into meaningful business impact? Do you thrive on leading complex transformation, aligning senior stakeholders, and turning ambitious plans into measurable outcomes?

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The Data Science function is delivering a significant, multi-workstream transformation. This role manages that portfolio and provides the governance backbone for that change: ensuring programme hygiene is fit for purpose, so delivery is timely and effective, keeping the change portfolio coherent, and giving senior leaders a clear, trusted view of progress, risk and value. The role also helps shape and sharpen new business cases so that the next wave of investment is well founded.

• Programme hygiene and delivery assurance:
  Define, maintain, and continuously improve the standards for programme and project management across the transformation: planning, RAID, dependency management, change control, benefits tracking etc. Assess hygiene across work streams, challenge where it is not fit for purpose, and coach programme and project lead to close gaps early. Provide independent assurance on delivery confidence, flagging slippage and emerging risk before it becomes an escalation.
• Apply sufficient technical understanding of data science, ML and AI engineering (e.g. model development and deployment, model registries, LLM optimisation, production-grade code) to challenge plans, estimates, dependencies, and risk assessments, and to spot when reported progress does not reflect technical reality.
• Governance and reporting:
  Run the governance cadence end to end, including operating committee and steering committee forums: agendas, papers, decisions, actions, and follow-through. Own all reporting materials up to senior leadership level, producing concise, accurate and decision-oriented packs, dashboards, and narratives. Establish a single source of truth for status, milestones, risks, and benefits, and ensure data quality behind it.
• Portfolio coherence:
  Maintain a coherent view of the whole change portfolio, identifying overlaps, conflicts, dependencies and gaps between work streams. Support prioritisation and sequencing decisions, balancing capacity, risk and strategic value. Align portfolio governance with wider Data Science OKRs and planning cycles.
• Business cases and investment:
  Support leads in building robust business cases: clear problem statements, options, costs, benefits and risks. Work with Finance to validate assumptions and track realised benefits against the original case. Help shape the pipeline of future initiatives so new proposals fit the portfolio and strategy.

• A data science, ML or AI engineering background, gained through hands‑on practitioner experience or through leading or governing data science delivery, sufficient to understand the technical content of the change work streams and to translate it accurately for senior, non-technical audiences.
• Substantial experience running portfolio, programme, or transformation governance in a complex, technical…