Head of Data Platform

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond. 

Fastmarkets is, at its core, a data business. The prices, indices, and market intelligence we produce are relied upon by participants across global commodity, metals, forest products, agricultural and carbon markets to make investment/risk management decisions.

The Head of Data Platform leads the team responsible for the organisation’s foundational data capability and for unlocking the commercially strategic opportunities that the platform makes possible. The role exists to ensure that data is ingested, modelled, governed, and served to internal

and external customer groups, through a Data Platform that operates as a product rather than a reactive service.

This is a strategic leadership role with both technical depth and a product mindset. The Head of Data Platform owns the maturity of the organisation’s Snowflake implementation, the data engineering function that staffs the team, the platform roadmap and SLAs, and the governance framework that underpins it. They are accountable for delivering against the needs of internal and external customer groups.

The role reports to the Director of Data & AI and has peer leaders in the AI Enablement, Data Insights, and Data Governance practices.

Principal Accountabilities

• Define, own, and deliver the multi-year strategy for the Data Platform, including the maturation of the Snowflake implementation, the curated data product layer, the published service catalogue that customer groups consume, and the strategic capabilities the platform enables.
• Own the direct monetisation capability for the Data Platform. Define and stand up – in close partnership with Product – the model by which curated data products are delivered to external paying customers via Snowflake-to-Snowflake sharing and equivalent mechanisms. This includes the technical pattern (including security and entitlements), the commercial packaging, the customer onboarding experience, the SLAs, and the operational model. The Head of Data Platform owns what this looks like and how it works; Product owns commercial strategy, pricing, and go-to-market.
• Build, lead, and develop, a world-class, highly-engaged, high performing team of data engineers and adjacent disciplines.
• Run the Data Platform as a product. Maintain a roadmap that balances customer-driven demand against foundational investment (governance, lineage, cost optimisation, observability) and the strategic capabilities that unlock new value – and that no single customer group could justify on their own.
• Own strategic vendor relationships.
• Represent the Data Platform to senior stakeholders, internal customer groups, and external paying customers. Build and broadcast the narrative that connects platform investment to revenue and to the strategic capabilities it enables.
• Work as a trusted design partner with neighbouring technology functions to deliver the above, including but not limited to Information Security, Cloud Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, IT, and Engineering.

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

Essential

• Demonstrable experience leading a data engineering or data platform team at senior level, ideally including a transition from project-based or reactive delivery to a product operating model.
• Deep technical credibility in modern data platform architecture – cloud data warehousing (Snowflake or Databricks strongly preferred), ELT patterns, dimensional and analytics engineering practice (data build tool or equivalent), semantic modelling, and governance tooling.
• Practical experience with ultra-modern data sharing patterns, including secure data sharing, reader accounts, and marketplaces.
• Track record of maturing a fledgling data platform into a strategic capability, with visible improvements in reliability, cost management, and customer adoption.
• Product mindset with commercial fluency – the ability to articulate a platform roadmap, define services and SLAs, defend foundational investment against demand-led pressure, and engage substantively with Product and Commercial colleagues on data product packaging, pricing, and customer experience.
• Strong stakeholder leadership across diverse customer types – non-technical business users, embedded technical users, internal analytics teams, engineering peers, and external paying customers – with the ability to set expectations and build trust.
• Experience hiring and developing a highly-engaged, high-performing team.
• Vendor management experience, particularly with strategic data infrastructure vendors at meaningful commercial scale.

Desirable

• Familiarity with the data needs of AI and ML use cases: feature engineering, embeddings, vector stores, retrieval patterns – sufficient to engage credibly with the AI team as a customer.
• Familiarity with the legal, contractual, and licensing considerations specific to selling data – data rights, customer obligations, audit, and the boundary between the technical delivery and the commercial agreement.

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

We are committed to ensuring all candidates feel welcomed and supported. Should your application advance and you require accommodations for the interview process, please inform us so we can make the necessary arrangements.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.