Head of Data

Role Overview

Head of Data at webook.com, Saudi Arabia's #1 event ticketing and experience booking platform. You will own webook's data function end-to-end—strategy, team, platform, and delivery—as the single person accountable for data across the organization.

Company Overview

webook.com is Saudi Arabia's leading event ticketing and experience booking platform in terms of technology, features, and agility. The company serves some of the largest mega events in the Kingdom and has surpassed over 2 billion in sales.

Role Purpose

Transform webook's first-party data into trusted decisions today and a monetisable asset within two to three years, operating in a regulated environment (PDPL / GDPR / NCA ECC) where only lawful, trustworthy data has value. Build and lead the data team, make the platform reliable, and position webook to sell data and insight, not just tickets.

Key Responsibilities

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 across engineering, analytics, governance, and the sequence in which each is built.
• Own the data platform direction and lead the managed-vs-self-hosted decision, presenting a costed recommendation within 90 days with a clear cost-control model.
• Align every data initiative to a measurable business outcome and re-prioritise the roadmap quarterly as economics move.

Team Leadership & Building the Function

• Assess, develop, and where needed strengthen the existing team; set a clear performance bar and build capability to meet it.
• Set quarterly OKRs for each direct report; hold fortnightly one-to-one meetings with written notes; run a monthly team standup with a rolling 90-day delivery view shared with VP Architecture and the CTO.
• Develop talent and career paths, mentor team members, and build an engaged, high-performing team; ensure retention and engagement are explicit success measures.

Data Platform & Engineering

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

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 capability 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.

Data Governance, Quality & Privacy

• Ensure data handling meets PDPL, GDPR, and NCA requirements across 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.

Data Monetisation & Commercial Partnership

• Own the path from internal analytics to embedded client insight to 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.

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.

Qualifications & Experience

• 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; demonstrated genuine people and team leadership, not only technical expertise.
• 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); ability 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 experience a strong plus.
• Commercial fluency; ability to translate technical work into business and board-level language.
• Track record of delivering against deadlines with evidence, not just intent.

Skills & Competencies

• Data strategy and roadmap development.
• Team leadership, talent development, and people management.
• Modern data stack architecture and platform selection.
• Data engineering and analytics practice.
• FinOps and cloud cost management.
• Data governance, quality, and observability.
• Data monetisation and product development.
• Regulatory compliance (PDPL / GDPR / NCA ECC).
• Commercial and business acumen.
• Infrastructure-as-code.
• Semantic / metrics layer design.

Additional Information

Preferred Qualifications & Experience

• 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 machine learning / 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.