Head of Data Executive Search

The Data Leadership Roles That Actually Exist

The Head of Data Engineering builds and maintains the data infrastructure — the pipelines, the warehouse, the transformation layers, and the tooling that makes data accessible to the rest of the organisation. This is a technical leadership role that requires managing engineers, making architectural decisions, and ensuring data reliability. It is not a business-facing role.

The Head of Analytics or VP of Data Analytics owns the business intelligence function — building the dashboards, defining the metrics, running the analytical work that informs commercial decisions. This profile is closer to the business and requires strong stakeholder management, the ability to translate ambiguous business questions into analytical frameworks, and the communication skills to present findings to non-technical audiences.

The Chief Data Officer is a senior executive who owns both the data infrastructure and the data strategy — setting the vision for how data assets create competitive advantage, managing the data organisation, and representing data as a strategic capability at the board and CEO level. This profile is typically appropriate for companies with 200+ employees and a data organisation of meaningful scale.

What to Look for in a Head of Data Candidate

Regardless of which profile the company needs, the most predictive indicator of success in a data leadership role is a specific track record of making data accessible to non-data people and influencing commercial decisions with data. The technical skills in data leadership are more commodity than the business translation skills. A Head of Data who cannot explain their work to a CEO or a board member will be chronically underutilised, regardless of how technically strong they are.

Reference conversations for data leadership candidates should specifically probe how the candidate has navigated the tension between data quality and data availability — because this tension is omnipresent in data leadership roles. Organisations always want more data faster, and the data leader must balance the pressure for speed against the integrity requirements that make data trustworthy. How they manage this tension reveals their operating maturity.

Majhi Group for Head of Data Search

Majhi Group places data leaders at growth-stage technology companies where the data function is a strategic investment, not just an operational backfill. We help founders clarify the data leadership profile before sourcing begins and source from the data leadership community rather than from generic technology executive networks. We run a 20-minute confidential search assessment covering your data infrastructure maturity, the business decisions you need data to support, and the data leader profile most likely to close the gap.