Head of Data Migration

PlotBox • Boston, MA

11h

About The Position

At PlotBox, data migration is a critical part of bringing our customers successfully onto our platform. We’re looking for an experienced Head of Data Migration to take full ownership of this function - leading the team, improving how we deliver, and building a migration capability that is scalable, predictable and trusted across the business. This is much more than a technical leadership role. You’ll be accountable for the people, performance and delivery of the Data Migration function, ensuring customers move successfully from their existing systems into PlotBox and that migration commitments can be relied upon by teams across the business. Our Data teams focus is on increasing throughput, improving predictability and moving further away from bespoke customer-by-customer migrations towards reusable, scalable migration approaches. We need someone who can lead that next stage. You’ll combine strong people leadership, technical credibility and commercial awareness. You’ll create accountability, develop the capability of the team, challenge existing ways of working and use meaningful data to understand where delivery can be improved. You'll also be comfortable getting close to the technology. While your primary responsibility is leading the function, you'll have sufficient technical depth to review and challenge migration approaches, contribute to technical decisions and establish strong engineering standards.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading a technical team, with overall accountability for performance, delivery and the effectiveness of the wider function.
• Strong and demonstrable people leadership capability, with experience setting clear expectations, creating accountability and addressing performance issues early, constructively and decisively.
• Experience improving data migration, data engineering or comparable technical delivery, including moving from bespoke, customer-specific approaches towards reusable, scalable or productised tooling.
• Experience establishing and using meaningful delivery and quality metrics to create transparency, identify bottlenecks and hold teams accountable for measurable outcomes.
• Strong commercial awareness and an understanding of how technical delivery commitments affect customers, revenue and wider business performance.
• Demonstrable experience leading change within a technical environment, including challenging established ways of working and successfully managing resistance to change.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading a data migration, conversion or data engineering function of a similar size and structure.
• Experience migrating regulated, statutory, sensitive or long-lived data where accuracy and integrity are critical.
• Experience within SaaS, local government, deathcare or another records-intensive/customer implementation environment.
• Strong hands-on SQL capability, with experience working across relational databases. Microsoft SQL Server and/or MySQL experience would be advantageous.
• Practical Python experience within a data engineering, migration or ETL environment, with sufficient technical depth to review, challenge and contribute to migration code.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end data migration delivery pipeline, from prerequisites and migration through Data Acceptance Testing, go-live and hypercare, ensuring clear ownership and accountability at every stage.
• Own migration schedules and delivery commitments, ensuring timelines are realistic, dependencies are understood and risks or delays are identified and communicated early and clearly to relevant internal teams and external stakeholders.
• Establish meaningful migration performance metrics and reporting, creating reliable measures for migration duration, throughput, quality and predictability to provide clear visibility of the team’s performance and contribution to customer go-live.
• Improve the instrumentation and tracking of migration work, ensuring accurate and consistent data is captured across tools and processes to support operational decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Drive improvements in first-pass data quality, reducing the number of customer acceptance cycles required and improving the predictability and speed of migrations through Data Acceptance Testing.
• Identify and remove bottlenecks across the migration lifecycle, using delivery and quality data to improve processes, reduce delays and increase overall team effectiveness.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership to the Data Migration team, reviewing and contributing to migration code, making technical and design decisions, and establishing engineering standards and best practices.
• Drive the development of reusable and scalable migration approaches, reducing unnecessary bespoke work and improving the efficiency, consistency and maintainability of migrations. Ensuring that migration playbooks are consistently followed to give the best outcomes for PlotBox and its customers.
• Lead and develop the Data Migration Team, providing clear expectations, coaching and support to enable them to take increasing ownership of day-to-day delivery, team performance and people leadership.
• Hold overall accountability for the performance and effectiveness of the Data Migration team, working through the Team Leads to build a high-performing, accountable and continuously improving team.
• Represent Data Migration across the wider business, partnering effectively with Sales, Customer Success, Finance, Operations and senior leadership to manage dependencies and ensure alignment on priorities and customer commitments.
• Provide clear and credible delivery commitments to stakeholders, proactively communicating risks, changes and potential delays and ensuring there are no surprises around customer delivery.
• Build confidence in the Data Migration function through improved delivery predictability, measurable performance, strong technical standards and consistent stakeholder communication.

Benefits

• Opportunity to take ownership of an established technical function at an important stage of its development.
• Scope to shape how the team operates, develop its people, improve its technology and create a migration capability that can scale with the business.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed