Head of Engineering - Data & Intelligence at Elliptic

The impact you will have: As Head of Engineering, you will lead the Data and Intelligence Engineering organisation, setting the technical direction, shaping the team structures, and driving engineering and operational maturity across the domain. Your ownership will span the ingestion of external and intelligence data sources through to the serving of foundational datasets that underpin our products. As the business scales rapidly, you will ensure that our data pipelines, infrastructure, and engineering practices scale with it, enabling reliable, high‑performance data flows and empowering teams across the company to build on robust, well‑engineered foundations. You will be the strategic and technical leader for this organisation, working closely alongside senior engineers, product, and intelligence to build the operating model, shape the strategy, and mature the organisation while keeping existing delivery on track and earning the trust and confidence of the team and your peers. Elliptic is known for its extensive and reliable datasets. You will play a critical role in ensuring that reputation scales. You will define how data is built, operated, and evolved as the business grows. The data platform serves product, intelligence, commercial, finance, and operations teams, and you'll be the primary point of contact across all of them. What you will do: - Own the technical vision and platform roadmap for the data domain, working with principal engineering on architectural decisions that balance business need, reliability, cost, and innovation - Build and mature the domain’s organisational structure, team boundaries, ownership models, ways of working, and hiring plans - Set delivery standards and cadences that improve predictability without killing velocity - Drive operational excellence. Help steer SLAs, observability, data quality practices, and incident response, ensuring the platform is reliable, measurable, and continuously improving - Serve as the face of data engineering across product, commercial, intelligence, operations, and finance - Work closely with engineering managers to build a clear picture of team performance and contribute to hiring, development, and retention of strong engineering leaders - Navigate the tension between supporting product and revenue teams and building reliable, scalable infrastructure. Demonstrate honesty and integrity when communicating what can and can't be prioritised. Go beyond the “what” of priorities and own the “why” too - Grow into increasing scope and responsibility as the engineering function scales and matures You will be a great fit here if you: - Get energy from building and scaling, developing teams, structures, practices, and strategies that enable sustained growth and technical excellence. - Stay close to the technology and can go deep in an architecture review, but know your job is to lead through others - Think about data infrastructure as a platform with internal customers, not just a collection of pipelines - Start from what the business needs and work backwards to what the platform should look like. Can paint a clear picture of platform excellence and lay out a vision for future platform capabilities and performance, and inspire others to rally around it - Can hold high standards and genuine warmth for your people, challenging and supporting them to develop, grow, and achieve their full potential - Push back when you need to, clearly and kindly, while keeping relationships intact - Are honest about where you're still growing and want a coaching relationship, not just a reporting line Our ideal candidate has: - Led a multi‑team engineering organisation, accountable for delivery success and for fostering the growth and development of your teams. - Led through others, fostering empowered teams and strong technical leadership at every level. - Owned data infrastructure in a product company where they felt the weight of reliability, cost and stakeholder expectations simultaneously. You have maintained workstreams of innovation and operational excellence side by side. - Built something organisational from scratch. For example a team, a capability, a delivery practice, an operating cadence - Worked directly with product, analytics, or business stakeholders to manage competing demands and communicate trade-offs Bonus Points for: - Having a genuine interest in the crypto ecosystem and being behind the mission of the company - Experience at a company in a similar growth phase - scaling a data/engineering cohort from ~20 into something meaningfully larger - Breadth across data engineering, operations, BI enablement, and product. You understand the full value chain from ingestion to decision and can make strong recommendations with little oversight JOB BENEFITS > How we work: - Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year - £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space > Learning & Development: - $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development > Vacation/ Leave: - Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays - An extra day for your birthday - Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave and leave. > Benefits: - Private Health Insurance - we use Vitality! - Full access to Spill Mental Health Support - Life Assurance: we hope you will never need this - but our cover is for 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries - £100 Crypto for you! - Cycle to Work Scheme