Data Martech Lead in Bury St Edmunds

Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni‑channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms. JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE100 publicly quoted company since 2019. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry.

About the Role

We are seeking a delivery‑focused and pragmatic Data Governance Manager to establish, embed and scale data governance across the JD Group. This is a newly created role, reporting into the Head of Data Architecture, and will play a critical role in building the trusted, well‑governed data foundations required to support analytics, regulatory compliance, and the responsible, ethical use of data within AI‑driven innovation. This role is based out of our Bury office with the expectation that the successful candidate will be in the office 4 days a week.

Responsibilities

• MarTech & Customer Data Strategy
  • Define and own JD’s MarTech and customer data approach in alignment with JD’s broader data strategy.
  • Establish a clear vision for how customer, loyalty, digital and marketing data is captured, integrated and activated across channels.
  • Shape the roadmap for building a scalable, future‑proof customer data and marketing technology ecosystem.
  • Define how customer consent and preferences are represented, governed and enforced across the MarTech and customer data landscape.
  • Ensure MarTech capabilities support personalisation, experimentation, orchestration and AI‑driven decisioning.
• Customer Data & Single View of the Customer
  • Lead the design of JD’s single customer view, working across Customer, Loyalty, Digital Behaviour and Marketing data domains.
  • Define identity resolution, data modelling and integration approaches to support consistent customer understanding across platforms.
  • Define how consent status and permissions flow consistently across customer, loyalty, digital and marketing systems.
  • Partner with the Data Engineering team to ensure customer data is well modelled, high‑quality and reusable.
  • Define how customer data is used to power orchestration and decisioning across channels.
  • Work with Digital Product and CRM teams to ensure activation platforms are correctly set up and data flows are integrated with the data platform.
  • Ensure activation and orchestration platforms correctly consume and enforce customer consent and channel‑level permissions.
  • Enable consistent measurement and feedback loops between activation, analytics and optimisation.
• Platform Design
  • Act as the technical and architectural authority for MarTech and customer data platforms.
  • Assess and recommend build vs buy decisions across customer data, orchestration, decisioning and marketing technology capabilities.
  • Work with third‑party suppliers and internal teams to ensure solutions align with JD’s architecture, security and governance standards.
  • Ensure MarTech and customer platforms are configured to support compliant consent capture, synchronisation and enforcement across integrated systems.
  • Support supplier selection, solution design and integration approaches.
• Collaboration with Digital & Marketing Teams
  • Partner closely with Digital Product, Digital, CRM and Marketing teams to translate business requirements into scalable data and technology solutions.
  • Ensure data considerations are embedded early in product and platform design.
  • Provide expert guidance to ensure solutions are robust, future‑proof and aligned to best practice.
• Leadership & Enablement
  • Operate as a senior individual contributor, providing hands on expertise and leadership within the MarTech domain.
  • Act as a subject matter expert and mentor for teams working with customer and marketing data.
  • Contribute to the development of standards, patterns and playbooks for MarTech and customer data solutions.
  • Support the Head of Data Architecture in shaping future capability and resourcing needs in this space.

Role Objectives & KPIs

• A clear, adopted strategy and roadmap for MarTech and customer data aligned to wider data strategy.
• A well defined and scalable single view of both known and non‑known customer.
• Effective orchestration and decisioning capabilities enabled across priority channels.
• Clear build vs buy decisions that balance speed, cost and long term flexibility.
• Strong alignment between MarTech platforms, the data platform and analytics capabilities.
• Compliant activation through accurate consent management and end to end data flows.
• Improved activation, personalisation and measurement outcomes for Digital and Marketing teams.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading or shaping MarTech and customer data capabilities in complex organisations.
• Deep expertise across customer data, CRM, digital analytics and marketing technology ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of identity resolution, customer data models and single customer view patterns.
• Experience working with cloud‑based data platforms, ideally GCP.
• Solid working knowledge of SQL and analytics data modelling concepts.