Alex Townsend
Head of Data  ·  Data Platform Leadership
Rotherham, UK  ·  Full UK Driving Licence 07877 059613 alex@townsend-data.co.uk townsend-data.co.uk
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Summary

Data leader with eight years' experience building and running data platforms on AWS, across healthcare, energy, education, retail, the public sector and fintech.

Head of Data at PEP Health since February 2026, reporting to the CTO. I'm responsible for data strategy, the data platform, data acquisition spend and a team of engineers. I'm hands-on enough to architect and build the platform myself, and I'm at my best where architecture, commercial pressure and people meet.

Looking for a Head of Data or senior data leadership role, permanent or contract.

Key achievements
Rebuilt PEP Health's AWS data platform end to end, cutting running cost from $26k to $7k a month and making new revenue streams much faster to onboard.
Led the data function through a security incident and a restructure (team of six down to two) and still delivered the rebuild.
Line-managed up to six engineers across data and web. Hired, developed, managed performance, and converted a contractor to permanent to secure ownership of a critical system.
Saved about $50k a year at Engie by re-orchestrating an AWS and dbt estate for parallelism.
Consolidated 300+ client databases into one multi-tenant Redshift warehouse at Civica, 70% cheaper to run.
Designed and ran training for technical and non-technical staff: AI fundamentals (Engie), SQL for data scientists, self-serve BI for executives and data modelling workshops (PEP Health).
Core expertise

Leadership

Line management · Hiring · Performance · Restructuring · Data strategy · Commercial input on data products · Vendor procurement · Executive stakeholders

Platform

AWS (Glue, Lambda, Step Functions, Batch, Redshift, S3, IAM) · Snowflake · dbt · QuickSight · CDK · CloudFormation · Terraform · CI/CD

Data

Data Vault · Dimensional modelling · Multi-tenant design · Entity resolution · ML and LLM pipelines · Web data collection at scale · Data governance and GDPR

Experience
PEP HealthJan 2025 – Present
Head of Data (from Feb 2026; previously Lead Data Engineer) · Remote · reports to CTO
Run the data function: data strategy, platform, team and data-related commercial decisions.
Line-managed up to six engineers (four data, two web). Led a restructure to two, handling each exit individually, and converted a contractor to permanent.
Built a multi-disciplinary team across data engineering, web engineering and machine learning: hired three data engineers, and now adding a Senior ML Engineer who will also help develop the data science team.
Made the case for a full platform rebuild until it was prioritised. Delivered it through a security incident that forced early shutdown of the old platform. Running cost down from $26k to $7k a month.
Designed a Data Vault core and dimensional marts from business process workshops. Millions of patient reviews from 10+ sources, resolved to hospitals, clinics and doctors, rebuilt nightly, with ML and LLM scoring.
Built a QuickSight proof of concept to cut ad-hoc questions from the leadership team. It became their main view of the data, is now used by about half the company, and its needs became part of the brief for the new architecture. With the web team winding down, now proving it can take over client-facing dashboards at lower cost, without dedicated web engineers.
Procure web data acquisition platforms. Advise the leadership team on data products and pricing.
Set IaC, CI/CD, testing and documentation standards. Ran SQL upskilling, executive self-serve BI and data modelling training.
The National CollegeFeb 2024 – Jan 2025
Data Engineer, Platform Owner · Sheffield (hybrid)
Took over a contractor-built platform the business couldn't maintain. Designed an AWS ingestion framework and Snowflake warehouse from scratch.
Hired and onboarded an engineer. Set engineering standards so the platform was owned in-house.
Managed competing priorities across stakeholders at every level.
EngieSept 2022 – Feb 2024
Data Engineer · Leeds (hybrid)
Re-orchestrated an AWS and dbt codebase for parallelism, saving about $50k a year and reducing failures.
Ran architecture reviews to find cost and performance problems.
Mentored engineers on AWS and Python. Designed and ran AI fundamentals training across IT.
NBrownSept 2021 – Sept 2022
Data Platform Engineer
Data engineering on a large Teradata estate in online retail.
CivicaApr 2020 – Sept 2021
BI Data Analyst / Data Engineer
Built a multi-tenant BI platform from scratch: 300+ client databases in one Redshift star-schema warehouse with QuickSight. 70% cost reduction.
U Holdings LtdEarlier career
Lead Data Analyst · Fintech
First data role. Taught myself Python, SQL, machine learning and data warehousing.
Led GDPR preparation as the regulation came in: investigated the requirements, ran training workshops, and drafted the data protection policy (DPIAs, subject access requests, data retention), reviewed by the CIO before launch.
Continuous professional development
Lean Six SigmaQualification
ML, Python, Mathematics, Microsoft Analytics Stack450+ hours · Udemy