Director of Data & AI in Surrey, Woking

Job Title

Director of Data & AI

Ref #

59635

Date posted

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Country

United Kingdom

Location

Woking

Business area

IT

Department

IT

Position level

2

Working time

Full Time

Contract type

Permanent

Working pattern

9am - 6pm Monday to Friday

What to Expect
Own McLaren's data, analytics and AI strategy, together with the platforms and teams that deliver it. Build and run a single enterprise data platform, analytics estate and AI platform that business teams can use themselves, supported by a central capability. Lead the data engineering, data analytics, AI/ML and data collaboration teams, bring generative AI into engineering, design, quality and customer-facing products, and put clear governance in place across both data and AI.
What You'll Do
Define the principles and multi-year roadmap covering platform, people, products and governance, secure executive sponsorship, and translate it into quarterly objectives and funding plans. Provide a secure, reliable, self-service platform with clear service levels, documented standard patterns and reusable components, connected to enterprise systems so teams can deliver faster at a controlled cost. Provide a secure, multi-model AI platform that keeps McLaren data within approved boundaries, and lead the integration of generative AI into design, engineering, quality and customer-facing products. Prioritise the portfolio of data and AI products, from ingestion and models to semantic layers, dashboards and AI agents, each with a clear business case, and make sure what the teams ship is accurate, version controlled and monitored in production.

Set up and lead the data and AI governance forum; define data ownership, quality standards, lifecycle and master data management; and enforce AI usage policy, model evaluation and data residency requirements. Embed privacy by design, data classification and lineage; prevent unmanaged use of consumer AI tools and reduce intellectual property and cyber risk; and work with the cyber security and cloud teams on controls. Work closely with product development and engineering, manufacturing and operations, and commercial and customer experience teams, and align with the cloud and security roadmaps; agree clear ownership of integration points with peer directors and represent data, analytics and AI in technical design forums.

Own the platform operating and capital budgets, manage unit costs such as cost per pipeline, per report and per AI query, hold suppliers to account, and reduce reliance on contractors by building permanent in-house capability.
What You'll Bring
Understanding engineering, design, manufacturing, quality and commercial domains, and how data and AI create advantage within them. Multi-model architectures, retrieval, agents, MLOps, and integration into engineering and manufacturing environments.

Leading data engineering and analytics teams, building pipelines and lakehouse architectures, semantic models and business intelligence products used across a large organisation.

Data and AI governance (usage policy, model evaluation, data residency), privacy-by-design, classification and lineage.

Experience in data, AI with extensive in leadership, ideally in Engineering or Technology spaceBuilding, mentoring and retaining specialist teams, and setting the standards and ways of working they share across the business.

Managing platform budgets, controlling unit costs and demonstrating the value returned from technology investment.

Track record of building academic and industry research partnerships. who sets a clear long-term direction and is equally comfortable with the detail of delivery, pragmatic about today's multi-platform reality while moving towards the target model.creating genuine demand for data and AI from peer directors rather than pushing capability at them, and settles ownership of integration points early and clearly.fluent across data engineering, analytics and generative AI, who earns the trust of engineers and executives alike.champions federated, automated governance and confronts uncontrolled AI usage head-on. who grows teams and communities, and focuses on real adoption and everyday use rather than deployment alone.
What We'll Do for You
We offer a wide – ranging benefits package, which includes: Structured career development framework25 days' holiday, plus bank holiday. Annual buy & sell up to five daysEnhanced company pension schemeDiscretionary annual bonus awardPrivate medical insurance and health cash planLife assurance benefitAbility to apply for a sabbatical of up to one year after only two years' serviceBenefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shoppingGenerous parental leave policiesA range of wellbeing initiatives, such as employee assistance programme and free financial & mortgage advice
Who Are We?
No restraints. No limitations. We don't simply push boundaries. We completely rethink them. McLaren Automotive exists to create breath-taking performance road cars.

It takes a community to do what we do. A diverse group of people with many areas of expertise, united by their passion to deliver visionary products and set new benchmarks. McLaren Automotive commits to equal opportunity for all. Diversity, Equality and Inclusion is at the heart of our impact, it drives our innovation and enables us to truly create something special. Join us on our journey.