Data Director

Director of Data

Dubai

On-site

We are working with an enterprise organisation who are scaling their internal data capability.

You'll step into a role with real technical scope: building, governing, and evolving a platform on Databricks and Azure that the wider business depends on daily.

It's a hands-on leadership seat for someone who wants to shape a growing data function from a position of genuine technical ownership, not manage it from a distance.

What you'll do:

• Lead and scale a data platform built on Databricks (Azure), covering architecture, pipelines, governance, and data quality
• Own and evolve the platform's core components: Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Azure Data Factory/Synapse or equivalent
• Establish data governance standards, including access control, data quality, and platform reliability
• Serve internal corporate functions (finance, operations, reporting); this is an internal-facing platform role, not customer/product data
• Own decisions on data architecture and be able to walk through real systems you've built, not just managed
• Support emerging AI/analytics use cases as a secondary focus; the core mandate is the data platform itself

What you'll need:

• Demonstrable hands-on experience with Databricks and Azure specifically: Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, ADF/Synapse or equivalent. Generic cloud data experience won't cut it
• A track record of building or scaling enterprise data platforms serving internal business functions, not consumer-facing products
• Experience setting data governance frameworks and standards, not just building pipelines
• Ready to walk through a real architecture or platform decision in interview, with specifics, not high-level talk
• Comfortable operating as a senior individual technical leader, close to the work, not purely managerial