Director of Data

We’re a sports media network, focused on building and nurturing a portfolio of highly engaged and connected communities of sports fans and bettors to create value for our partners. We empower sports fans with real-time intelligence, premium independent content, and unique tools so they can compete in the sports betting game. FairPlay Sports Media is a collection of market leading brands including oddschecker, WhoScored, SuperScommesse, FairPlay Technologies and Confido. In addition, FairPlay has a vast network across the sports tech and media industries through our partnerships including Reach, Gazzetta dello Sport, DAZN, SportsGrid and The Jockey Club amongst others. iGaming is one of the fastest-growing and most technologically innovative sectors, and we're on top of our game, powered by market-leading tech and driven by brilliant people. We champion diversity and operate an open and inclusive culture as well as being focused, fast-paced, and always making sure to have fun along the way.

Role Summary

We are looking for a visionary, business-focused Director of Data to transform our data ecosystem into a high-performing, organization-wide asset. In this role, you will be taking full ownership of our end-to-end strategy, rollout, and organizational data usage. Our engineering and analytics teams have an excellent capability to deliver; your mission is to provide the cohesive, shared roadmap that guides them. You will transition our data department from a reactive "service-provider" model driven by ad-hoc stakeholder requests into a proactive, product-oriented capability. Acting as the ultimate data advocate, you will bridge the gap between technical execution and commercial business growth. This role operates on a hybrid model, requiring you to be on-site at our London offices one day a week.

Why This Role Exists

We are moving away from descriptive reporting and manual raw data adjustments toward a scalable, automated ecosystem where data is a primary driver of product development and revenue. You will lead the charge in auditing and streamlining our current fragmented BI tool landscape (Looker and PowerBI) to define a unified tooling strategy. Ultimately, you will build a single source of truth that allows stakeholders across Finance, Marketing, Commercial, and Engineering to confidently make data-driven decisions and leverage first-party customer data to personalize fan experiences.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead & Transition the Team: Manage and unite our teams. Champion their evolution into a high-performing, product-oriented data unit with a clear roadmap that balances resolving technical debt with high-impact business wins.
• Drive Data-Driven Culture & Self-Service: Move the business from descriptive reporting toward predictive and prescriptive insights, empowering cross‑functional stakeholders with intuitive, self‑service data options.
• Enforce Product Tracking & Telemetry Authority: Partner with Product and Engineering teams to ensure data tracking is baked into features from day one. You will hold the authority to halt product launches if data telemetry is insufficient, ensuring we never "drive without a speedometer."
• Define BI & Infrastructure Strategy: Formulate and execute a clear path forward for our analytics stack. You will evaluate our current parallel usage of Looker and PowerBI and decide whether to consolidate, integrate, or replace them.
• Establish a Single Source of Truth: Standardize key global KPIs and create a coherent business metric dictionary across all regional departments so "the truth" is identical for everyone.
• Commercial & 1st-Party Data Growth: Collaborate with Commercial, Marketing, and Finance leaders to future-proof revenue streams by leading our strategic shift from 3rd-party to 1st-party customer data, improving revenue attribution and audience cohort segmentation.

Experience & Skill Set We Are Looking For

• 10+ Years of Data Leadership: Proven experience leading data engineering, analytics, and business intelligence teams in a fast-paced digital environment.
• Strategic & Business-First Mindset: You are an executive leader who focuses on business outcomes, strategy, and cross-functional advocacy, rather than functioning as a full-time coder.
• Core Technical Literacy: While you won't be building pipelines yourself, you possess strong cloud architecture awareness (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, AWS) and are fully comfortable running basic SQL queries to understand and validate our data foundations.
• Change Management & Consolidation: A track record of migrating legacy tech stacks, defining global governance standards, and cleaning up tool fragmentation (specifically within Looker/PowerBI ecosystems).
• Stakeholder & Political Management: Exceptional leadership skills with the ability to manage C‑suite expectations, navigate complex organizational dynamics, and influence engineering and commercial behaviors.

Nice to Have

• Experience in high-volume consumer tech, sports media, or iGaming environments.
• Familiarity with data landscape changes during corporate Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A).
• Exposure to or strong interest in AI/LLM integrations for building "conversational" data query interfaces for non-technical users.

What you’ll get back from us

Alongside being challenged daily and a real interest in your development, you will also receive:

• Subsidized Sky HD package, broadband and discounted sky talk
• Free Puregym membership
• Free healthcare with Bupa, life assurance and income protection
• Pension scheme with up to 9% contribution from the company
• £1,000 training fund each financial year, to spend on your professional development
• Unlimited holiday plan

Research shows that women and ethnic minorities are less likely to apply if they don’t meet every qualification. If you’re passionate about our purpose, determined to take on challenges, and eager to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement. We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team, and to ensuring an accessible recruitment process.

Equal opportunity employment

• Non‑discrimination in recruitment, compensation, development, and promotion
• Inclusive leadership and respectful workplace behaviors

If you need any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know.