Who are we?

Founded in 2001, The Student Room (TSR) is the UK’s largest, most useful and best-loved online student community. Millions of students turn to us first for advice, info and support on work, learning and life’s ups and downs. Millions of students turn to us first for advice, info and support on work, learning and life’s ups and downs. And that means we’re uniquely privileged to connect educators, employers and consumer brands to switched-on young people actively seeking out answers and meaningful connections.

What does the Head of Data at TSR do?

We are looking for a Head of Data to adapt, evolve and develop our data science and analytics function at The Student Room Group. You will be critical to significant parts of our strategy and will help to transform the UK’s best student community into the most powerful student recruitment platform for the UK’s higher education system.

This is an exciting opportunity to build a highly impactful operational team to drive the core company strategy forward. It’s rare to get the chance to build a new business function from the ground up. You will help identify and implement the required technologies and business process.

You and your team will draw on your data skills to work with large and varied data sets, setting a data strategy which finds value for our users, and for our commercial clients in the analysis. You will develop high-value data visualisations, develop data models and perform rigorous statistical evaluation of the results to produce actionable insights to unlock the value in our data.

Key role responsibilities:

• Provide overall leadership for the data team
• Define a long-term vision/strategy for data and translate that into a roadmap, defining OKRs to clearly measure progress
• Help define a culture of data collection, integrity, and how to gain insight
• Train, support and inspire the business community to take a more data informed approach to how they operate
• Identify opportunities for deeper analyses that can inform the business and drive decision-making and customer strategy
• Develop members of the data team, ensuring their capabilities to perform to top-level are constantly increasing. This includes training, defining progression frameworks, performance reviews, etc.
• Understand how source/target systems work, gathering business requirements in order to produce user stories on how to collect and model data in the Data Warehouse
• Support the product team defining and measuring A/B tests as well as tracking requirements
• Drive or work with engineering leads on architectural decisions around data platforms and systems
• Mentor the data team, providing guidance on how to structure analyses, presentations and how to effectively query data
• You should champion the scientific method and strive for excellence in results, balanced with working in an ‘Agile’ way to achieve rapid turnaround.
• Develop processes and tools to monitor and analyse model performance and data accuracy.
• Develop business processes for utilising the insights developed through data models to inform strategy and product development.
• Develop the company strategy towards data science

NOTE:  This job description is not intended to be all-inclusive and will evolve with the ongoing needs of the company. You will be expected to perform other related duties as reasonably instructed.