Head of Data

About sennder

Role Overview

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Data & ML organization end-to-end. While you will own the overarching data strategy, business alignment and governance, you will manage a Director of Engineering who drives the day-to-day technical execution of our infrastructure, platform, and ML models. 

• Stabilize and build the leadership benches beneath you through active coaching, strategic hiring, and organizational design. 

• Align technical standards and compliance practices with the SVP of Engineering’s organization, without folding into it. 

• Own the definitions, models, and platform that make “one number, one meaning” real, and retire legacy dashboards and duplicate reporting that undermine it, with a clear migration path rather than an overnight switch-off. 

• Treat data outputs as products with users and a quality bar, not artifacts nobody owns; hold the line on what’s technically right while managing the pace of change deliberately with the stakeholders who depend on it. 

• Break data-quality problems into concrete use cases that demonstrate value fast, not abstract governance initiatives. 

• Diagnose where incentives, not tooling, are the root cause of poor data, and build the business case for the leaders who own those incentives to fix them. 

• Translate technical ML/data science work into sennder’s core value drivers: margin expansion, cost reduction, and service differentiation, prioritizing ruthlessly by business value. 

• Bridge the ML literacy gap with business leadership, and own the data governance foundation that lets sennder scale AI safely and commercially. 

• Shift Data’s reputation from reporting support to strategic enabler through delivered impact, not a rebrand. 

• Build direct, trusted relationships with business leaders in their language, and partner with the CPTO and SVP of Engineering to keep data and AI ambitions grounded in real business need.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data, analytics, or ML leadership, including 5+ years leading multi-team organizations at meaningful complexity and scale. Comfortable in high-ambiguity, fast-changing environments, with a bias for pragmatic, visible progress. 

• A track record of turning a data organization from a reporting/service function into a trusted, product- or platform-grade capability, including stabilizing and building leadership benches through hiring, promotion, and, where needed, replacing team leads. 

• Strong architectural understanding of modern data platforms and semantic layers, coupled with deep, proven expertise in Data Product Management and business alignment. 

• Working fluency in applied ML/AI sufficient to sponsor, prioritize, and commercialize initiatives,  

• Experience with data governance and quality frameworks suited to an AI-native business (not purely compliance-driven contexts). You do not need to build the models yourself. 

• An exceptional ability to make complex technical and data topics simple for non-technical executive and operational audiences. 

• A track record of driving real change with stakeholders used to a different way of working: holding firm on what’s technically right while staying genuinely collaborative on how and when change lands, without absorbing blame that belongs to the business.

WHY CHOOSE sennder…