Manager, Data Services

Your role:

Are you ready to lead a team that drives growth and innovation? As Manager of Data Services at Global Relay, you'll provide direction, guidance, and strategic insight to shape the department's future. You'll create and execute strategies, align roadmaps with the wider business, and be a strong advocate for Data Services across the organization.

In this role, you'll lead a talented team of client-facing members and technical specialists, balancing both the commercial and technical sides of the business. You'll ensure top-quality customer service, optimize workflows, and manage all departmental resources - including recruitment, learning and development, performance management, and career progression.

This is a dynamic role for someone with excellent people and communication skills, who can quickly grasp technical concepts and confidently collaborate with teams across Global Relay. If you thrive on leadership, problem-solving, and driving results, this is your opportunity to make an impact.

Your responsibilities:

People

• Lead by example, fostering a positive team culture and strong relationships though approachability and support
• Use leadership as a tool for growth by coaching, mentoring and developing future leaders
• Manage all aspects of departmental human resourcing and learning development, including recruitment, performance management and career progression of team members. Ensure adequate headcount, staffing and training are forecasted and in place to meet current and upcoming major initiatives
• Act as an escalation and authoritative point of contact for other departments at Global Relay. Actively handles internal and customer related conflict, and resolves them with emotional intelligence and consideration of the department and organizational ecosystem
• Perform regular touchpoints with departmental Team Leads to provide status updates, ensure issues are raised, and visibility provided. Proactively work with the Team Leads to identify priority items and have them addressed in the required timeframe
• Attending regular sync-ups with fellow managers and senior leaders from other teams that impact or are impacted by Data Services. Build and maintain strong relationship with relevant peers to optimize cross departmental knowledge transfer and workflow

Process

• Create, drive and evolve the department's strategic vision. Translating organizational roadmap and initiatives into actionable and structured departmental goals and tasks
• Lead the execution of any change initiatives to best position the department to respond to future trends and needs by developing and communicating a strategic roadmap
• Owning the end-to-end accountability for the delivery of department services. Be the authoritative expert for the department on commercial, operational and technical components.
• Mitigate and manage risk; look for and execute on opportunities to drive departmental growth and its impact on other parts of the business
• Mine data to effectively measure value, unearth issues and opportunities for innovation. Generate and assess department metrics, with the aim of reviewing operational performance and providing transparency to track progress and determine improvement needs
• Work successfully with a wide variety of cross-functional internal teams to advocate for and resolve customer issues
• Collaborate with senior management to contribute to the product and business roadmap and ensure the delivery of complete and assigned solutions

Technology

• Understand the design, business logic, and technical architecture of Global Relay platform components and how those components interact with and impact the department. Own and lead the strategic development of new features and enhancements as required by the department
• Communicate feature requests into requirements, models, workflow diagrams, user stories, acceptance criteria, and other suitable artifacts
• Work with Product & Program Management, Development, and other relevant departments to identify and coordinate cross-component dependencies throughout the development process. Actively remove obstacles blocking progress and ensure initiatives are delivered within schedule
• Ensure relevant new product releases are complimented with timely announcements, training, documentation, and short/long-term support. Ensure product updates and requirements are cascaded into the department's system architecture, knowledge base and to client-facing documentation
• Work with Global Relay's Enterprise Data Services Team to develop an understanding of their infrastructure and facilitate integration with Data Services operational workflow. Ensure the scope of those engagements are clearly documented with all stakeholders
• Work with the leadership, technology architecture, application development, implementation and operations teams to help Data Services achieve optimal production environment that meets current and future business needs and objectives
• Assess, adopt and integrate new systems and technologies as per evolving security and audit requirement

About you:

• Post-secondary education; undergraduate degree in a relevant field. Graduate or Post-Graduate Degree in management or similar is desirable
• 10+ years of managerial experience, preferably in a large, dynamic and significant revenue generating team in the information technology sector
• Understanding of cloud solutions and prior experience of working with confidential customer data in regulated industries preferred
• Strong experience managing technical components and issues. Demonstrate ability, comfort and curiosity to comprehend and articulate technical as well as business requirements
• Adaptability in working with multiple and cross-functional teams on initiatives with varying degrees of flexibility/rigidity at different points in the organizational roadmap
• Demonstrates ability to assess customer needs and deliver appropriate solutions
• Strategic mindset with the ability to influence, engage and build trust with executive stakeholders
• Experience managing and expanding a global team located in different offices
• Proven ability to effectively manage time, workload and shifting priorities in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with a strong attention to detail
• Resourceful, with strong analytical and problem-solving skills and significant attention to the smallest details
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills. Ability to write and speak English fluently, with strong editing skills. Previous legal, technical, and/or business communication writing experience desirable
• Enthusiastic, strong work ethic and positive attitude
• Excellent active listening, negotiation and presentation skills at the highest level
• Highly proficient with Microsoft Office, specifically Excel and Outlook
• Technical/desktop trouble-shooting skills and computer proficiency