Senior Director, Data Platform & Governance

Job Description

#LI-KO1

Are you interested in owning the technical delivery and evolution of LEGO's enterprise data platform?

Bring your experience running modern cloud data platforms at enterprise scale and join a highly skilled Data & AI organisation at the LEGO Group!

• Own the technical delivery and evolution of LEGO's enterprise data platform (Databricks on AWS), with a relentless focus on the experience of the people who use it every day.
• Lead the data platform engineering and data governance teams. Build a culture where success is measured by how easily and quickly platform users can get their work done.
• Embed data governance into the platform. Automate quality checks, access controls, lineage, and cataloguing so that doing the right thing is the default, not a separate process.
• Own LEGO's enterprise data model. Work with domain data modelers to keep it accurate, current, and genuinely used as a shared language across the business.
• Partner with the platform product function to shape the roadmap. Bring technical depth and constant user feedback to ensure priorities reflect real needs.
• Stay close to the vertical data teams. Understand their workflows and frustrations. Seek out problems before they intensify.
• Set technical standards and engineering practices for how data is ingested, transformed, stored, and served. Keep them useful, not just tidy.
• Manage platform cost, performance, and reliability. Own the vendor relationships with AWS and Databricks. Treat uptime and performance as promises to users.
• Advance LEGO's responsible AI and data ethics posture. Make sure governance frameworks keep pace with AI adoption and stay practical enough that teams follow them.

The Data Office provides the LEGO Group with its enterprise data platform, data governance, and standard methodologies for data and AI. This role leads the platform and governance function — the shared infrastructure and standards every data team depends on.

Your users are internal — data scientists, engineers, analysts, and AI practitioners across the group — but you should hold yourself to the same standard a great product company holds for external customers. You should know who your users are, what slows them down, and what they wish existed. A core ambition is to make governance invisible by building it into the platform: if someone needs to read a policy to do the right thing, the platform hasn't done its job. You will also steward the enterprise data model — not as a solo architect, but by creating the processes and tooling that keep it alive across domains. The product function sits separately, so success depends on a strong collaborative partnership: you bring technical depth and operational ownership; the product team brings prioritisation and structure.

• Experience running modern cloud data platforms at enterprise scale, ideally Databricks or similar lakehouse architecture on AWS
• Track record leading platform or data infrastructure teams with a product approach — measuring success by adoption and user satisfaction, not just uptime
• Proven ability to implement governance as a platform capability: automated quality checks, lineage, cataloguing, and access controls rather than manual processes
• Experience owning or shaping an enterprise data model in a large organisation, including keeping it current across multiple domains with federated modelling teams
• Ability to build a productive partnership with a product counterpart who owns the roadmap
• A habit of staying close to users through feedback loops, office hours, or similar mechanisms
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to explain infrastructure trade-offs to non-technical partners
• Experience managing significant cloud spend and vendor relationships

Other nice to have experiences:

• Familiarity with the Databricks ecosystem, particularly Unity Catalog as a governance mechanism
• Experience with governance-as-code: policy enforcement through CI/CD, automated data contracts, schema validation
• Background in internal developer platforms or platform-as-a-product approaches
• Experience with data mesh or federated data ownership models
• Exposure to AI/ML governance: model registries, feature stores, and production model oversight
• Experience in retail, consumer products, or manufacturing

Applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis. However, please note we do amend or withdraw our jobs and reserve the right to do so at any time, including prior to any advertised closing date. So, if you're interested in this role we encourage you to apply as soon as possible.

What’s in it for you?

Here is what you can expect:

Family Care Leave - We offer enhanced paid leave options for those important times.

Insurances – All colleagues are covered by our life and disability insurance which provides protection and peace of mind.

Wellbeing - We want our people to feel well and thrive. We offer resources and benefits to nurture physical and mental wellbeing along with opportunities to build community and inspire creativity.

Colleague Discount – We know you'll love to build, so from day 1 you will qualify for our generous colleague discount.

Bonus - We do our best work to succeed together. When goals are reached and if eligible, you'll be rewarded through our bonus scheme.

Workplace - When you join the team you'll be assigned a primary workplace location i.e. one of our Offices, stores or factories. Our hybrid work policy means an average of 3 days per week in the office. The hiring team will discuss the policy and role eligibility with you during the recruitment process.

Children are our role models. Their curiosity, creativity and imagination inspire everything we do. We strive to create a diverse, dynamic and inclusive culture of play at the LEGO Group, where everyone feels safe, valued and they belong.

The LEGO Group is highly committed to equal employment opportunity and equal pay and seeks to encourage applicants from all backgrounds (eg. sex, gender identity or expression, race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, age and religion) to apply for roles in our team.

The LEGO Group is fully committed to Children’s Rights and Child Wellbeing across the globe. Candidates offered positions with high engagement with children are required to take part in Child Safeguarding Background Screening, as a condition of the offer.

Thank you for sharing our global commitment to Children’s Rights.

Just imagine building your dream career.

Then make it real.

Join the LEGO® team today.