Head of Data and AI

ABOUT US

Indie Campers is the leading campervan provider, dedicated to making road trips accessible and unforgettable for everyone. Innovation, product-led growth, and an
unwavering commitment to our customers are at the heart of everything we do. With more than one million nights rented and travellers from 169 countries, we provide a single and
trustworthy digital experience for road trips across the United States, Europe, and Oceania - offering multiple camper-van configurations and even the chance to buy one of our
vehicles.
We’re scaling our technology organisation to build a modern, AI-ready data platform that powers real-time decisions, automation, and world-class customer experiences.

THE ROLE

As Indie Campers’ Head of Data & AI (reporting directly to the CTO), you will lead our Data Engineering & Platform, Data Science/ML, and Analytics functions. You’ll be a player-coach: a strong people manager of a small, high-leverage team and a hands-on technical lead who designs the architecture, sets standards, and ships. Your mandate: deliver a reliable, cost-efficient, privacy-by-design data platform; enable self-serve analytics; and infuse AI into core workflows (pricing, e-commerce, customer experience, operations).

WHAT WILL YOU WORK ON?

• Own the end-to-end platform (ingest → transform → serve): streaming + batch pipelines, orchestration, CI/CD, observability, cost controls.
• Define data contracts, schemas, and a semantic/metrics layer for consistent KPIs across the company.
• Standardise ELT with dbt; orchestrate with Airflow/Prefect; implement lake/warehouse patterns (e.g., S3/Parquet + Athena/BigQuery/Snowflake).
• Build MLOps foundations (feature store, model registry, online/offline evaluation, monitoring, safe rollout/rollback).
• Ship pragmatic ML/AI: demand forecasting, price optimisation, propensity scoring, LLM-powered classification/extraction/summarisation for CX & Operations.
• Partner with Engineering to productionise models (APIs, events) and measure business lift.
• Lead a small team of analytics engineers/analysts; deliver trusted  dashboards (Metabase/Superset/Looker) and experiments (A/B).
• Create templates and training for self-serve analysis; raise SQL and data literacy across the org.
• Own data governance, catalog, lineage, and GDPR/PII controls; drive DQ SLAs and incident playbooks.
• Partner with Corporate IT/CISO on access, encryption, retention, and vendor risk.
• Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing team; establish operating rhythms (QBR/OKRs), technical design reviews, and post-mortems.
• Communicate clearly with execs; tie data work to revenue, margin, and 
  customer outcomes.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

• 10+ years in data roles with 3+ years leading teams (data eng + DS/ML + analytics) in 
  a high-growth product company. 
• Hands-on architect: you’ve built/modernised warehouses/lakes, streaming + batch 
  pipelines, and metrics layers; you still code (Python/SQL).
  • Python, SQL, dbt; orchestration (Airflow/Prefect); streaming 
    (Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis) and batch ELT; data modeling (Dimensional + Data 
    Vault where appropriate).
  • Warehouses/lakes: BigQuery / Snowflake / Athena + S3; storage formats 
    (Parquet/Iceberg/Delta); CI/CD for data; observability (Great 
    Expectations/Monte Carlo).
  • Catalog/lineage (DataHub/Amundsen), RBAC/ABAC, PII handling, GDPR 
    alignment, retention, and incident response.
• Practical MLOps experience: training/serving at scale, monitoring drift, experiment 
  design, and measurable impact in production.
  • MLOps: feature store (Feast/Tecton), model registry (MLflow), experiment 
    tracking, online/offline validation, monitoring.
• Build business wide Data Intelligence capabilities and self-serving BI:
  • BI: Metabase / Superset; semantic/metrics layer (LookML/dbt 
    Metrics/Transform).
• Strong stakeholder and team leadership: translate business goals into a focused 
  roadmap, manage trade-offs, and drive adoption.
  • Hiring, coaching, performance management; roadmap/OKRs; vendor 
    management and cost discipline; crisp executive communication.
• Excellent communication; fluent in English (Portuguese/Spanish a plus).
• Bonus for Computer Vision and Deep Learning Product development experience