Deputy CDO

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Deputy Chief Data Officer (Deputy CDO) based in Romania. The Deputy Chief Data Officer will play a central leadership role in driving the execution and strategic development of a global data and analytics function within a product-driven technology organization. Acting as the second-in-command to the Chief Data Officer, you will oversee key initiatives spanning data engineering, machine learning, product and marketing analytics, UX research, and experimentation. This position combines strategic leadership with hands-on operational ownership, ensuring that complex cross-functional projects translate into measurable business outcomes. Working directly with C-level executives and business leaders, you will shape priorities, allocate resources, and improve organizational performance. You will also strengthen team leadership, establish effective operating processes, and ensure the reliability and scalability of data platforms. This is an opportunity to grow into a Chief Data Officer position while directly influencing business performance and long-term strategy. Accountabilities The Deputy CDO will take ownership of execution across the Research Center, translating strategic priorities into measurable results while ensuring operational excellence, effective resource management, and strong collaboration across teams. - Strategic Initiative Leadership: Lead selected strategic initiatives from business case development and prioritization through implementation and measurable business impact. Ensure projects align with organizational objectives and deliver tangible value. - Executive Stakeholder Management: Collaborate directly with C-level executives and business leaders to align priorities, negotiate resources and timelines, and manage strategic trade-offs using data-driven arguments and financial insights.

- Cross-Functional Project Execution: Oversee major initiatives across data and analytics, including data platform development, BigQuery migration, complex machine learning projects, experimentation processes, AI-powered analytics, UX research, and data quality improvements. - Project Delivery and Issue Resolution: Identify and resolve delivery bottlenecks across teams. Clarify project scope, assign ownership, establish next steps, address dependencies, and escalate risks early to ensure initiatives progress successfully. - Resource and Backlog Management: Manage capacity, resources, and backlogs across multiple teams. Prioritize initiatives according to business value, coordinate dependencies between ML, backend, product, and analytics teams, and reassess or discontinue projects that fail to deliver expected results. - Operational Management and Governance: Establish and maintain the operating framework for the Research Center, including monthly business reviews, quarterly planning, project reviews, retrospectives, commitment tracking, escalation procedures, and centralized performance dashboards. - Business Impact and ROI Measurement: Translate strategic initiatives into measurable business objectives, expected benefits, and financial outcomes. Monitor ROI and actual performance against plans, ensuring that delivery success is measured by business impact rather than task completion alone. - Team Leadership and Development: Support and strengthen team leads across Product Analytics, Data Engineering, Machine Learning, and UX Research. Help them define objectives, prioritize work, improve management practices, provide constructive feedback, and develop their leadership capabilities. - Operational Performance: Oversee the operational health of the data function, monitoring data freshness, platform uptime, ML infrastructure stability, delivery predictability, and experimentation throughput.