Head of Data Strategy
On-siteAbu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Job Summary
Define and execute the data sourcing strategy for Index Pricing Calculations, identifying and evaluating market data vendors, exchanges, and alternative providers. Lead end-to-end commercial negotiations with data partners to structure licensing agreements, SLAs, and pricing benchmarks while managing the full vendor lifecycle. Oversee the design and implementation of data ingestion pipelines, ensuring normalization, validation, and compliance with retention policies. Establish automated monitoring for data reliability, produce health reports, and maintain a registry of all license obligations and audit requirements. Hire, mentor, and develop the two-person Data Strategy Group team to foster a documentation-first culture. Collaborate daily with Financial Logic, Product Innovation, Risk, Big Data, Legal, and Technology teams to align data inputs with pricing methodology, new product requirements, and risk calculations.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years in data strategy, data sourcing, or data partnerships within trading, exchanges, or financial services
- Demonstrated experience identifying and acquiring unique or alternative data sources that provide competitive advantage
- Proven track record negotiating commercial data agreements — pricing, licensing terms, redistribution rights, SLAs
- Deep understanding of market data ecosystems (exchanges, vendors, alternative data providers, aggregators)
- Strong understanding of index pricing or benchmark methodologies and the data inputs that drive them
- Technical literacy — comfortable discussing APIs, data pipelines, connectivity architecture, and data quality frameworks
- Experience building or managing small, high-performing teams
- Excellent stakeholder management across commercial, technical, and senior leadership functions
Desired Qualifications
- Experience at a proprietary trading firm, quantitative fund, or exchange in a data sourcing/strategy capacity
- Direct experience with cryptocurrency or derivatives market data (order books, trade feeds, reference data, on-chain data)
- Background in alternative data identification, evaluation, and commercialization
- Hands-on experience with data engineering tools (Python, SQL, streaming platforms)
- Familiarity with data licensing models specific to financial markets (exchange fees, redistribution tiers, non-display usage, derived data policies)
- Network of relationships across the market data vendor landscape
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