Head of Data

What’s the Challenge?

If you eat, sleep and breathe data, you’ve got a passion for food and want to be part of building the UK’s sustainable food system then we should definitely have a chat. We’re on a mission to apply knowledge and science to grow the right plants, in the right place, in the right way. At the heart of that mission is great food and the data that dreams are made of.

We have plenty of data to work with – across our R&D and production sites, every year we will seed and harvest billions of plants, we collect real-time climate and water conditions, measurements on plant growth, harvest weight, and post-harvest organoleptic and microbiological measurements. We now need to hire a Head of Data who can help build a team to tackle problems that are critical to the business and our growth, using the data that we have available.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for our first data hire. You’ll be joining the team and creating the tools to meet our business needs. You will need to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in to deliver value from the get-go, making the data we collect less error-prone and easier to analyse. We’ll need you to be hands-on with an eye to leading a world-class team.

You’ll need to:

• Have conversations with people who are not data experts, understand their needs and identify the problems where we can add value by making improvements in the way we handle data.
• Develop a strategy for data use based on the needs of the business.
• Evaluate the various tools available to implement the strategy.
• Know what resources you need to support you to implement our data strategy
• Build and run a successful team.
• Bridge the language barrier between data science and business needs.
• Prioritise your time - there’s loads to do and you’ll need to determine what needs doing when and when to stop.

You will report directly to Tom Webster, who co-founded GrowUp 9 years ago and is now Product Director. You’ll be working closely alongside the R&D and Operations teams.

Objectives

• Identify the low-hanging fruit and quickly implement solutions to streamline data analysis in key areas of the business.
• Get under the skin of the business and develop a strategy to maximise our use of data over the next 3 years.
• Hire a brilliant team to deliver the strategy.
• Deliver!

Responsibilities

• Be the internal champion and font of knowledge for all things data.
• Identify areas where we can improve the way we grow our food by improving how we collect, store and analyse data.
• Lead our data team.
• Ensure that our data science projects are improving the way we grow our products and contributing to a better customer experience.

Requirements

Essential

• Background in statistical analysis.
• Understanding of how to evaluate data science projects.
• Ability to build aggregate data sets and deploy tools to make them easy to analyse.
• Experience leading a data team.
• Ability to continuously learn, work independently, and make decisions with minimal supervision.

Preferable

• Experience in product development and/or data engineering.
• An analytical mindset and eagerness to solve technical problems with data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical tools.
• Experience or interest in working with and using large-scale data to solve valuable business problems.
• Knowledge of Python & R.
• Comfortable with tabular data and tabular data transformations.
• Experience with methods for achieving business value using data.
• Experience with prototype development with test user groups as well as broader user roll outs.
• Understanding of machine learning methodologies.
• Understanding of pipeline development best practices (such as branching, testing,etc.).

The role will be based either out of London or Cambridge. You'll be expected to spend at least 3 days a week at our Research Centre in Cambridge for the first 6 months, and 2 days a week thereafter.

About Us

We're on a mission to apply knowledge and science to grow the right plants, in the right place, in the right way.

We’re a leading UK vertical farming company who have spent almost a decade growing salads at three vertical farms, bringing customers restaurant-quality leafy greens that stay fresher for longer. Salads are just the tip of the iceberg – our future is more farms, more crops, and the technology to make vertical farming the norm.

We’re passionate about getting people to rethink their salads and delivering healthy, affordable, British-grown food to more customers, with a lighter environmental footprint and a more resilient year-round supply chain. We bring purpose and impact to the fresh produce category and expect a transformational impact over the next decade as we add in new crops.

We are a fast-growing dynamic team, that cares passionately about what we’re doing. We’re interested in people who want to help turn food production on its head, who are naturally entrepreneurial, commercial and restless to make it happen.

We have developed industry-leading technology integrated with renewable energy to drive down the costs and carbon footprint of vertical farming while cutting down on food waste in the supply chain and at home. Our fourth farm, currently under construction in Sandwich, Kent, is expected to begin delivering its first harvest of ready-to-eat salad leaves to U.K. supermarket shelves in the 22/23 winter season.

Our team is the most valuable part of our business – our success is defined by the hard- working, brilliant and enthusiastic people we employ. Our recruitment process and employment decisions are based on our business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications. We provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants without regard to race, colour, age, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin or disability status. We don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics and we encourage all suitable applicants to apply for open positions.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary
• Discretionary annual bonus based on company, team and individual performance
• Employee incentivisation scheme
• 25 days holiday
• Enhanced parental leave
• Pension
• Employee benefits programme with Bravo Benefits
• Vitality at Work (health insurance)
• Income Protection Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Critical Illness Insurance