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Director Technology - Data Platforms London, UK We are looking for a senior data leader to join Simple Machines in London as part of our Global Data Practice leadership team. This is a strategic and hands-on leadership role focused on helping shape the future direction of our data platform capability across the UK and Europe. The individual will play a key role in defining our propositions, strengthening our technical capability, and helping clients modernise their data ecosystems for an AI-native future. The role requires someone equally comfortable operating at executive, architectural, commercial, and delivery levels. We are looking for a leader who understands where enterprise data platforms are heading over the next five years, not where they were five years ago. Key Responsibilities: - Part of the Global Data Practice leadership team - Helping define and evolve Simple Machines’ data platform propositions, technical direction, and strategic positioning - Advising enterprise clients on modern data platform strategy, architecture, operating models, and AI readiness - Supporting organisations as they evolve from traditional centralised data platforms toward AI-native, real-time, and data product-oriented operating models - Working closely with Engagement Managers and senior leadership across major strategic initiatives - Leading architecture and technical direction for complex enterprise data platform and transformation programs - Acting as a senior technical counterpart across strategic client engagements and partner relationships - Pre-sales, proposal development, technical solution shaping, and executive stakeholder engagement - Building trusted relationships with strategic technology partners and staying current with emerging platform capabilities and market direction - Supporting recruitment, mentoring, capability uplift, and practice development across the broader engineering organisation - Leading major client initiatives across data engineering, platform modernisation, AI enablement, and operational data systems - Contributing to thought leadership, market positioning, and growth initiatives across the UK and Europe Requirements Must-Haves - 10+ years’ experience across data engineering, data platforms, analytics engineering, or data architecture - Proven consultancy and enterprise client-facing experience - Strong pre-sales, proposal development, and solution shaping capability - Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering modern cloud-native data platforms at enterprise scale - Strong experience developing solutions centred around data products and reusable enterprise data capabilities - Deep understanding of data mesh principles, federated governance, and scalable domain-oriented data ownership models - Experience designing platforms and architectures to support AI-native use cases, machine learning systems, agentic workflows, and intelligent software platforms - Strong understanding of real-time and event-driven architectures, including streaming data systems and low-latency processing patterns - Experience building platforms that support governed, discoverable, reusable, and operationalised data products across large organisations - Familiarity with contemporary data stack technologies and modern engineering practices - Strong understanding of platform architecture, distributed data systems, orchestration, governance, and scalable data product design - Experience with technologies and ecosystems such as GCP, AWS, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Kafka, Spark, dbt, Kubernetes, Airflow, ML/AI enablement, or similar modern platform tooling - Strong commercial acumen and ability to engage credibly with senior technical and business stakeholders - Experience leading major enterprise initiatives and high-performing engineering teams - Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, high-performance consultancy environment Ideal Profile We are looking for someone