Head of Data
On-siteAmsterdam, North Holland, The Netherlands
Job Summary
Lead the full Data & ML organization end-to-end, stabilizing leadership benches through active coaching and strategic hiring while aligning technical standards with the SVP of Engineering. Establish one source of truth by retiring legacy dashboards and migrating duplicate reporting, treating data outputs as products with defined quality bars. Break data-quality problems into concrete use cases that demonstrate value fast, diagnosing root causes in incentives rather than tooling. Translate technical work into margin expansion, cost reduction, and service differentiation, bridging the ML literacy gap with business leadership. Shift Data's reputation from reporting support to strategic enabler through delivered impact, building direct relationships with business leaders to keep AI ambitions grounded in real need.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years in data, analytics, or ML leadership
- 5+ years leading multi-team organizations at meaningful complexity and scale
- Comfortable in high-ambiguity, fast-changing environments
- Bias for pragmatic, visible progress
- Track record of turning a data organization from a reporting/service function into a trusted, product- or platform-grade capability
- Experience stabilizing and building leadership benches through hiring, promotion, and, where needed, replacing team leads
- Strong architectural understanding of modern data platforms and semantic layers
- Deep, proven expertise in Data Product Management and business alignment
- Working fluency in applied ML/AI sufficient to sponsor, prioritize, and commercialize initiatives
- Experience with data governance and quality frameworks suited to an AI-native business
- Exceptional ability to make complex technical and data topics simple for non-technical executive and operational audiences
- Track record of driving real change with stakeholders used to a different way of working
- Ability to hold firm on what's technically right while staying genuinely collaborative on how and when change lands
- Ability to not absorb blame that belongs to the business
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