Head of Data Platform & Data Products

About the role

The role owns the end-to-end data platform that underpins 9fin's customer-facing data products, ensuring that data moves reliably from ingestion to serving. You will architect and operate the ingestion, storage, and delivery layers that power screeners, embedded analytics, and data feeds for the world's largest debt markets. This position requires deep systems thinking to manage event-driven and batch pipelines while enforcing data contracts that protect sensitive information. You will not build analytics or business intelligence; instead, you enable the Analytics team and ensure their semantic layer remains the single source of truth. The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, data architecture, and product ownership, demanding rigor in governance and clarity in external SLAs. You will define and enforce standards that allow data to flow securely between internal services and external financial institutions. Success is measured by the reliability, performance, and usability of the data products that 300+ institutions depend on daily.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design and operate event-driven and CDC ingestion pipelines that stream high-volume market and trading data into the lake with low latency and high resilience.

Implement and manage change data capture strategies across financial services systems, ensuring data freshness and consistency for downstream consumers.

Build and maintain a scalable lakehouse built on Parquet, Trino, and modern table formats, optimized for performance and cost at global scale.

Own the serving and caching tier that delivers sub-second query performance for customer-facing screeners and embedded analytics under production load.

Establish and govern data contracts using schema registries and versioned Avro and Protobuf definitions to coordinate changes across producers and consumers.

Operate a reverse-ETL platform that reliably pushes derived datasets back into operational systems and third-party tools used by market participants.

Lead the integration with external data sharing mechanisms, including Snowflake and Databricks Delta Sharing, APIs, and secure file feeds for regulated data.

Define and enforce data classification and entitlements, ensuring that sensitive people data and other controlled assets remain within governed boundaries.

Partner closely with Product Engineering domain teams to define paved-road ingestion paths and versioned interfaces instead of ad hoc access to raw tables.

Continuously optimize throughput and cost across streaming and batch workloads, applying deep knowledge of Kafka, Flink, Trino, and cloud data platforms.

Champion schema evolution strategies that handle breaking changes safely, enabling downstream systems to adapt without service disruption.

Drive operational excellence in the data platform, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and incident response for production data flows.

Collaborate with the Analytics team to consume their semantic layer definitions, avoiding duplication and maintaining a coherent data ecosystem.

Evaluate and pilot new data technologies that reduce latency, improve reliability, and unlock new forms of customer-facing data products.

Requirements

Has built and operated a customer-facing data product under an SLA, such as embedded analytics, a data-feed or API business, or a data-sharing product, not merely internal reporting.

Demonstrates deep experience moving high-volume data in production environments, covering event-driven ingestion, CDC, stream processing, batch jobs, and file-based vendor feeds over SFTP or managed transfer systems.

Shows fluency with schema registries and data contracts, including Avro and Protobuf, managing evolution and breaking changes across distributed producers and consumers.

Possesses strong expertise with Parquet, Trino, streaming frameworks such as Kafka and Flink, and lakehouse platforms like Snowflake and Databricks.

Exhibits product and governance instincts, including multi-tenancy design, row-level entitlements, usage metering, and data classification for compliance and security.

Has experience scaling data platforms to handle extreme throughput and cost sensitivity while maintaining strict service levels for critical financial applications.

Understands the operational realities of running a 24/7 data platform, including monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and disaster recovery in regulated industries.

Demonstrates the ability to work closely with domain experts in financial services, translating complex market workflows into robust data pipelines and contracts.

Nice to have

Experience in financial data, capital markets, or market-intelligence products, such as those built at Bloomberg, S&P, or similar institutions with regulated data.

Practical notes

Work abroad for up to 3 months a year.

1 month paid sabbatical after 5 years of service.

Hybrid working model, to allow you the flexibility to decide how, where and when you do your best work.

25 holiday days per year.

Local public holidays (with the ability to exchange them for alternative days).

Enhanced parental leave & flexible working arrangements available.

Professional learning and development budget.

Pension (your minimum contributions are 4% with 9fin matching up to 7%).

Private Medical Insurance.

Paid sick leave with Income Protection for long periods of illness.

Group Life Assurance.

Season Ticket Loan & Cycle to Work schemes.

Equal opportunity employer.