Director of Data Platform (10 month FTC - Maternity Cover)

Lyst is a global Fashion Tech company and premium shopping app, founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 200M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion items & products in one place, via an assortment of 8.5M+ items from over 17,000 of the world’s leading brands. We are a scale-up business with a current team size of c.150 people in London, combining an agile mentality with a proven business model and over a decade of experience. This provides a balance between foundations and structure, and autonomy and pace.

At Lyst we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn’t, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better decisions and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper. Lyst has raised over $160m from leading investors including Accel, Balderton, Molten Ventures, Fidelity International, and LVMH.

We are looking for a Director of Data Platform to lead our best-in-class analytics engineering and data platform engineering team.

You will be responsible for executing the data strategy and supporting in delivering business strategy, providing technical direction on the data and analytics platform across both functions, and managing analytics engineers. You will inspire and drive best practices across the company.

Leading the Data Platform Squad, you will serve as the main point of contact and support across the business, addressing and prioritising all Data Platform related work, and ensuring that Data Platform are in the correct conversations to drive as much impact as possible with data across the business.

Success in this role will require experience with the modern data stack, experience leading analytics engineering, experience leading data platform engineering, a proactive mindset, a commitment to execution and a supportive approach to team members will be key.

You will report to the VP of Data & Engineering, working closely with the Director of Analytics as well as leadership across Engineering and other areas of the business. Our stack includes AWS, Snowflake, dbt, Looker and Python.

Responsibilities include:

Leadership and Management:

• Lead and mentor a diverse, high performing team of data platform and analytics engineers
• Line manage the analytics engineering function
• Align team objectives with company goals and strategic initiatives
• Manage sprints within the team, ensuring effective prioritisation and alignment to business and engineering goals
• Lead the management of large-scale data projects

Technical Direction:

• Provide expert guidance on analytics and data platform engineering
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve Lyst data, to drive business success
• Drive and advocate best practices within data platform and across the wider business

Strategic Execution:

• Plan and ensure execution of data strategy initiatives with a data platform lens
• Align data strategy initiatives with the business strategy
• Drive data forward through tooling, technologies, platform and culture
• Drive high data quality and robust data governance across the company

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Collaborate with technical and non-technical stakeholders to identify and build new data opportunities
• Drive data delivery in other areas of the business

• Proven experience in a senior or head of data platform role, preferably within e-commerce or technology sectors
• Strong leadership skills and line management skills
• Experience working with the modern data stack, ideally AWS, Snowflake and Looker
• Experience with data modelling, ideally dbt
• Experience with data architecture and data warehousing
• Strong understanding of the importance of data quality and how to drive this through tooling (e.g. data contracts)
• Experience driving change through analytics and data initiatives
• Strong in high level thinking and detailed problem solving

• Our Ways of Working: We come into the office between 2-4 days a week and we're always in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We strongly believe that in-person collaboration and time spent together as a team allows us to deliver high impact work, but the flexibility to also work remotely supports our diverse team.
• Time Off: In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
• Competitive Family Leave Package: This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.
• Clothing Benefit: We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service
• Private Healthcare: Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start..
• Training Allowance: We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.
• Pension Scheme: Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.
• Eye Tests and Vouchers: Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.
• Cycle-to-Work Scheme: Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them.
• Transport Season Ticket Loan: Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.
• Social Events: Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.

We want to build a world where fashion works for everyone, and we want teams that are just as inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture at Lyst. We recognise and celebrate the value and impact diversity brings to our company and are committed to ensuring this is a consistent focus, for which we are held to account. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this role. We are happy to talk about flexible working arrangements.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Lyst we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.