Head of Data

Do you want to love what you do at work? Do you want to make a difference, an impact, transform peoples lives? Do you want to work with a team that believes in disrupting the normal, boring, and average?

If yes, then this is the job you're looking for ,webook.com is Saudi's #1 event ticketing and experience booking platforms in terms of technology, features, agility, revenue serving some of the largest mega events in the Kingdom surpassing over 2 billion sales.

Role Overview

Own webook’s data function end-to-end strategy, team, platform and delivery and be the single person accountable for data at webook. Turn our first-party data into trusted decisions today and a monetisable asset within two to three years, in a regulated environment (PDPL / GDPR / NCA ECC) where data we cannot trust or lawfully use is worthless. Build and lead the team, make the platform reliable, and set webook up to sell data and insight, not just tickets.

What You’ll Own

1. Data Strategy & Roadmap

• Produce webook’s first documented data strategy and a phased, costed roadmap within 60 days of start, endorsed by the VP Architecture, Platform & AI and the CTO.
• Define the target operating model for the data function engineering, analytics, governance and the sequence in which it is built.
• Own the data platform direction. Lead the managed-vs-self-hosted decision and present a costed recommendation within 90 days, with a clear cost-control model.
• Align every data initiative to a measurable business outcome; re-prioritise the roadmap quarterly as the economics move.

2. Team Leadership & Building the Function

• Assess, develop and where needed strengthen the existing team; set a clear performance bar and build the capability to meet it.
• Set quarterly OKRs for each direct report; hold fortnightly 1:1s with written notes; run a monthly team standup with a rolling 90-day delivery view shared with VP Architecture and the CTO.
• Be a genuine people leader: develop talent and career paths, mentor, and build an engaged, high-performing team. Retention and engagement are explicit success measures, not afterthoughts.

3. Data Platform & Engineering

• Be accountable for reliable, tested, observable pipelines client-facing dashboards accurate and current, with stale or broken data caught before a client ever sees it.
• Own the platform direction across the modern data stack warehouse / lakehouse, transformation (dbt), orchestration, BI and serving - making pragmatic build/buy and managed/self-host calls across open-source (ClickHouse, Superset) and major managed platforms (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks).
• Institute FinOps discipline: a clear monthly platform budget with alerting; own the platform budget and keep cost predictable and under control.
• Establish infrastructure-as-code, data observability, and clear SLAs for data delivery.

4. Analytics, Insight & Data Products

• Establish a single source of truth and a governed metrics / semantic layer; eliminate conflicting metric definitions across the business.
• Raise the bar on analytical quality for internal decisions and for client-facing insight.
• Build the muscle to ship data products: embedded client analytics, benchmarking, and insight services.
• Partner with product and commercial to define webook’s first paid data / insight product within 12 months, with a credible commercial case.

5. Data Governance, Quality & Privacy

• Ensure data handling meets PDPL, GDPR and NCA requirements classification, access control, residency, and cross-border transfer.
• Stand up a data catalog and data-quality standards with named ownership across data domains.
• Define the lawful-basis and controls framework required before any data product ships - webook’s “licence to monetise.”
• Coordinate closely with the Director of InfoSec & Cybersecurity and the GDPR Delivery Lead on data privacy and security.

6. Data Monetisation & Commercial Partnership

• Own the path from internal analytics → embedded client insight → productised data, sequenced so trust is earned at each step.
• Work with commercial leadership to size, package and price data and insight products.
• Build the reliability and governance foundations that make external monetisation possible - and defensible.

7. Stakeholder Management & Data Culture

• Be the trusted data partner to the executive team; translate technical work and data risk into commercial language.
• Drive data literacy and a “data as a business enabler” culture; remove silos and shift data out of being treated as an IT by-product.
• Represent data credibly with clients where insight is part of webook’s offering.

Requirements

Essential

• 10+ years in data, with at least 3-5 years in a senior data leadership role (Head of Data / Director ) at a technology, SaaS or consumer-platform company.
• Proven track record building and leading high-performing data teams across engineering, analytics and governance a genuine people and team leader, not only a technologist.
• Deep, hands-on understanding of modern data platforms and the modern data stack: warehouses / lakehouses, transformation (dbt), orchestration, BI, and serving layers.
• Experience with open-source platforms (ClickHouse, Superset) AND major managed platforms (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks) able to make pragmatic build/buy and managed/self-host decisions with cost firmly in mind.
• Strong command of data engineering and analytics practice: pipelines, dimensional modelling, semantic / metrics layers, data quality and observability.
• Demonstrated ability to turn data into business value - ideally including data products or monetisation.
• Working knowledge of data governance and privacy in a regulated environment (PDPL / GDPR a strong plus).
• Commercial fluency: able to translate technical work into business and board-level language.
• A track record of delivering against deadlines - with evidence, not just intent.

Preferred

• Experience monetising data or building data products sold externally.
• Familiarity with the KSA and EU regulatory context (PDPL, GDPR, NCA ECC)
• Experience making data “AI-ready” and enabling ML / analytics at scale.
• FinOps / cloud cost-management experience.
• Relevant qualifications in data, computer science or a related field; cloud or platform certifications (GCP / AWS / Azure, Snowflake, Databricks) a plus.
• Experience in events, ticketing, e-commerce or marketplace businesses.