Vetted on a call by a Wave consultant, not scraped. £110,000 and above.
Led the analytics engineering function at a venture backed insurance business for 7 years, managing 3 people including one based in Boston. Snowflake and dbt for the pipelines, and they have run enterprise BI rollouts across Looker, Omni and Tableau rather than just used them. Shipped a pay-away model and a unified content model, the sort of project that touches the whole business rather than one team.
Looking forWants greenfield work and a genuine say in the architecture, in a scale-up where data sits close to the business. They have had enough of a centralised team they can't get out of.
How they came acrossTechnical but commercially minded, which is rarer than it sounds. Communication rated 10 out of 10 and they are comfortable in front of stakeholders, which is most of the job here.
SQL, dbt, Snowflake, Python · Airflow, Fivetran, Jenkins, Git · Looker, Omni, Tableau, Evidence
5 employers over 14 years, starting in underwriting and retail analysis before moving into analytics engineering at a venture backed insurer and then a large media group. Average tenure on file is 1 year 2 months, though the insurer stint ran 7 years across several roles.
Won't do more than 4 days in an office, and rules out oil, tobacco and anything with comparable ethical questions. They are only 6 months into their current job, so expect a question about it.
Bachelors in business administration and management.
Stood up a data warehouse and reporting function from nothing at a multi-brand gaming group and scaled the team to 8 across analysts, data scientists and engineers. Runs a 24/7 platform serving more than 20 consumer brands, a B2B arm and an in-house studio, on AWS with Data Vault 2.0 modelling, Airflow, Redshift and Snowflake. They were a CTO before this, so the commercial and regulatory side is not new to them.
Looking for8 years in, the senior people they worked closely with have gone and leadership has changed above them. They want a data engineering leadership role with a real mandate to shape the function, not just keep it running.
How they came acrossDeliberate, and doesn't oversell. Answers come back short and they need drawing out, but the substance is there. Unbothered by transformation work or a newly created role.
Python, SQL, Data Vault 2.0, semantic layer design · AWS, Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery · Airflow, Terraform · Metabase, Tableau
5 employers over 20 years, from a gaming startup and a Mediterranean telecoms operator into a CTO seat and then 8 years leading data at an international multi-brand gaming group. Average tenure 3 years 11 months, longest stint 8 years 8 months.
Three month notice, and after 8 years in one place a move into a faster organisation is a real adjustment. They talk slowly and don't elaborate much, so leave room for it.
Nothing on file beyond a PRINCE2 Practitioner certification.
Data engineering with machine learning attached, at an insurance fintech that went from 200 to nearly 400 people while they were there. £2m of savings out of one fraud detection project, and live ML systems taking hundreds of thousands of requests an hour. Python and Kotlin, dbt on BigQuery, Airflow and Prefect, Terraform for infrastructure, with backend work in Spring alongside it.
Looking forThe company hires senior data engineers externally instead of promoting, and they have stopped waiting. Wants a 4 or 5 person team, equity or profit share, and a route towards CTO. Small company, data as the product.
How they came acrossScored 10 out of 10 on communication from our recruiter, which is not something we hand out often. Talks about project planning and milestones as readily as about pipelines, which is what the CTO ambition rests on.
Python, Kotlin, SQL · dbt, BigQuery, Airflow, Prefect · AWS, GCP, Terraform · scikit-learn, SageMaker
5 employers over 9 years, starting as a statistical methodologist at a UK public sector statistics organisation, then a supermarket group's technology arm and now an insurance fintech. Average tenure 1 year 6 months, longest stint 2 years 5 months.
Three month notice, and they won't work with defence, gambling or tobacco. They want equity and a path towards CTO, so a straight senior individual contributor seat won't hold them for long.
Masters in social policy from a Russell Group university.
Tell me which came closest and I recalibrate, then come back with 10 to 15 more inside 24 hours.
Show me the wider bank