Senior Manager Data and Insights

As part of our continued growth and investment in our data and analytics capabilities, we have an exciting opportunity to join AJ Bell. You will play a pivotal role in leading the delivery of high-impact data, business intelligence solutions, and commercial and customer analytics that help inform and sharpen the AJ Bell D2C strategy. This role sits at the heart of our business, and you will act as a trusted partner and adviser to our senior management team along with colleagues from product, marketing, digital, and UX, ensuring they have high-quality data and insight at their fingertips.

What does the job involve?

• Leadership of a growing and high-performing team of data engineers, BI developers, and analysts – coaching individuals and the team to deliver their best for the business.
• Fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning to drive professional growth and development within the team.
• Developing and delivering the D2C data strategy through consulting with stakeholders and developing a comprehensive understanding of their goals and strategies, ensuring our data architecture is robust, fit-for-purpose, and scalable against our ambitious growth ambition.
• Ensuring strong technical and business processes including documentation so that our data pipelines and data assets are robust, and that change is delivered in a governed and controlled manner and at the pace our stakeholders require.
• Setting out and delivering our reporting architecture, guiding the team to continuously improve our suite of dashboards, and rolling them out to the business while taking the lead on delivering self-service and improved data literacy across the division.
• Continually evolving our dashboard suite in line with stakeholder feedback.
• Developing the analytics and insight roadmap, engaging with senior leaders across the business to ensure their immediate and longer-term needs are met.
• Acting as the data and analytics SME in critical projects and programmes, ensuring they are supported with time-critical, relevant, and high-quality insights.
• Ensuring the team delivers high-quality analytics projects that are accurate and on time/on brief, with clear and well-evidenced recommendations and actions in place.
• Working closely with our stakeholders in D2C (particularly Marketing and Product) to understand their plans and strategies to develop an operating model and plans for data and analytics.
• Engaging with and working closely with our central data and technology teams to deliver changes and create an aligned way of working and ensure cross-functional alignment.
• Continually assessing our ways of working and roadmaps, proactively identifying opportunities for efficiency and innovation.
• Collaborating on projects, sharing best practices, and agreeing on common ways of working across the AJ Bell data community.
• Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards related to data privacy, security, and confidentiality.
• Monitoring any risks to the team and owning the rectification of any data incidents.
• Supporting and enabling the business to achieve its regulatory requirements, including consumer duty.

About you

• Significant proven experience in leading and developing data, reporting, and analytics teams in financial services or a highly regulated industry.
• Excellent long-term planning and short-term prioritisation skills, including effective communication and ensuring delivery of priorities.
• Experience of developing a data and analytics strategy and evidence of delivering against a prioritised roadmap.
• A track record of delivering highly scalable and robust data architecture, particularly working with real-time or near real-time data and pipelines.
• Experience of working with diverse data sources across customer, transactional, and external data, and different cadences.
• Experience of working with third-party data enhancement and marketing data sources such as Google Analytics is highly desirable.
• In-depth knowledge of cloud-based data architecture, database development, and management.
• Previous experience with Snowflake is desirable.
• Best practice for systems and data governance including development processes and documentation.
• Previous responsibility for business-critical data assets and platforms.
• Hands-on experience and ownership of marketing automation platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Marketo, or Bloomreach is highly desirable.
• Proven understanding of GDPR and data governance, preferably in financial services.
• Demonstrable experience of developing and scaling a high volume and complex reporting architecture and dashboard suite.
• Broad knowledge of business intelligence principles, approaches, and tools/platforms. Power BI is preferred.
• Understanding of marketing and product performance metrics and approaches.
• Exposure to Google Analytics and user engagement tools and testing platforms such as Contentsquare, AppsFlyer, Optimizely is highly desirable.
• Experience of developing and applying robust AI-based approaches and LLMs to generate efficiencies.
• Extensive experience of small- and large-scale analytical project approaches encompassing data mining, summarisation, and presentation of impactful and insightful results.
• Excellent proficiency in data manipulation languages, particularly SQL, and able to write complex queries and repeatable stored procedures.
• Experience in low-code solutions like DBT is highly desirable.
• Data storytelling and able to condense complex analytics into clear narratives and actions for a range of technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical experience of data science and predictive techniques such as regression modelling, cluster analysis, decision trees, etc. is desirable.
• Strong understanding of data and systems integration and data pipelines including development approaches.
• Understanding of marketing and communication technologies, and modern personalised marketing principles particularly using CRM platforms and orchestration tools.
• Outstanding stakeholder engagement and management skills.
• Highly effective communication skills and comfortable working with both technical and non-technical teams.
• Proven ability to work effectively with multidisciplinary teams across technology, operations, product, and marketing.

What we offer

• 27 days holiday, increasing with service + buy/sell scheme + bank holidays.
• 8% Pension with matched contributions.
• Discretionary bonus scheme.
• Share schemes (including free shares and BAYE).
• Health Cash Plan and discounted private healthcare.
• Enhanced family leave (subject to qualifying criteria).
• Travel and bike loan schemes.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• We offer hybrid working, with a minimum of 50% of your working time per month spent in the office. This role can be based in London or Manchester. For new starters, there is an initial period of full-time office working to help you settle in and build relationships.

Inclusion