Company: Social Finance Ltd

Apply for the Lead, Data & Digital Transformation – Associate Director

Location: London

Job Description:

Associate Director – Data & Digital (2 posts)

We are looking to recruit two roles at Associate Director level. In these roles, you will play a critical role leading major strategic portfolios & programmes, contributing to our data & digital strategy and shaping new opportunities, and coaching and mentoring colleagues.

Salary: £70,000Location: Hybrid, London Bridge SE1Closing date: 31 July 2026

The opportunity

Data & Digital is a significant growth area for Social Finance, and we are now looking to grow our leadership team to deliver on the ambitions of our impact strategy and contribute to scaling key impact portfolios.

Across these roles, we are looking to bring on individuals with a range of skills and interest areas, including leadership of complex programmes, spanning technical, commercial, policy and operational expertise; digital product management and scaling of platform delivery models; and leadership of strategic partnerships and business development.

The team

Our UK Team comprises around 60 dedicated change‑makers, bringing together a wide range of skills and expertise to deliver better solutions to complex social problems. These roles will anchor to the Data & Digital Community of Practice within our UK Team.

As a Community of Practice, we bring multi-disciplinary data & digital skills to solve complex problems and improve outcomes for people and communities. Our portfolio spans Social Finance’s four key impact areas: Children & Young People, Health & Social Care, Employment & Skills, and Housing & Homelessness. Across these, we focus on delivering programmes with the greatest potential for impact at scale, addressing a range of levers for systems change.

Examples of key strategic programmes include:

Developing National Social Care Data Standards: We have partnered with central government to shape the rules, data models and market conditions that enable key information to be shared and systems to interoperate at scale across children’s and adult social care. This includes developing and governing data standards, contributing to improving analytics, identifying opportunities to support children as early as possible, and releasing time to care for social workers. Social Finance has an ongoing role convening strategy, design and implementation of these data standards, triangulating inputs from across technical, commercial, policy and operational domains.
Scaling a Common Data Platform to Enable Regional Children’s Services Analysis: We collaborated with local authorities to develop a secure data platform that facilitates regional analysis of children’s services data, unlocking insights around critical areas to improve outcomes for children and families, from demand modelling to inform service planning, to analysing sufficiency of care placements. The work started in London in 2020, and the data platform is now used by c. 40% of local authorities.
Delivering Digital Innovation Support Programmes in Health & Care: We have collaborated with foundation and government partners to deliver 6 digital innovation support programmes with national / international reach, supporting 200+ innovators across impact areas including Mental Health Data, Care Tech and Dementia Tech. Our support combines strategic support for funders with a comprehensive support offer for innovators, enabling teams to tailor their learning journey across technical, human‑centred design and scale & sustainability modules.

The roles

Across these roles, we are looking to bring on individuals with a range of skills and interest areas, including:

Digital product management & scaling of platform delivery models – in the next 12–18 months, we have a particular opportunity to scale implementation of our Children’s Services Data Platform, providing an exciting strategic platform for individuals looking to combine product management experience with leadership skills to successfully take a platform to national scale;
Leadership of complex programmes, spanning technical, commercial, policy and operational expertise: we aim to drive systems change through data & digital, therefore our programmes provide a unique opportunity for individuals bringing a combination of technical and non‑technical skills. For example:
- Our national data standards programmes require navigating trade‑offs across policy, delivery, data and technology, and progress is often dependent on coalition‑building rather than direct control.
- Our digital innovation support partnerships involve delivering a combination of technical, human‑centred design and scale & sustainability support to set teams up for success in delivering data & digital transformation.
Leadership of key strategic portfolios and shaping of new opportunities: we have a range of long‑term strategic partnerships across government, foundation and wider public and third sector collaborations. We are particularly interested in those who bring experience of delivering data & digital transformation in sectors relevant to Social Finance’s four impact areas: Children & Young People, Health & Social Care, Employment & Skills, and Housing & Homelessness.

We are open to hearing from individuals who bring a combination of skills and experience across one or more of these key areas, and do not expect all candidates to demonstrate experience across all of these.

Key Responsibilities

Programme leadership and delivery

Lead and oversee large data & digital programmes, often spanning multiple organisations, sectors and delivery partners.
Hold the overall project vision while managing distinct workstreams with different rhythms and risk profiles.
Set priorities, sequencing, and trade‑offs across policy, delivery, data, technology and information governance.
Track how delivery decisions connect to commercial considerations e.g. contract requirements, financials and client relationship.
Identify and manage risks, interdependencies and constraints, managing upwards effectively and coordinating with functional leads where appropriate (e.g. Information Governance, Legal, Finance).

Stakeholder management and coalition building

Build and sustain trusted relationships with senior stakeholders across government departments, arm’s‑length bodies, foundations, local authorities, NHS Trusts, vendors and delivery partners.
Navigate complex political, commercial and organisational dynamics, exercising effective influence across partners with differing incentives and priorities.
Build strong working relationships with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, translating technical detail into a clear narrative appropriate for non‑specialists, and aligning individuals from different disciplines around a shared vision.
Act as a credible external ambassador for Social Finance in senior forums.

Programme team leadership and development

Coordinate across a multi‑disciplinary programme team, fostering effective collaboration across disciplines (including e.g. software developers, data scientists, user researchers, service designers and operational or domain specialists).
Deliver strong project management, providing clarity, structure and momentum for team members – including navigating ambiguity in the early stages of a programme and bringing structure without overengineering or limiting scope for iteration over time.
Enable effective problem solving through influencing, coordinating and unblocking across teams, rather than directing.
Contribute to a positive, inclusive team culture, and support staff development, morale and wellbeing.

Working with specialist content as a generalist

Operate confidently as a generalist engaging with specialist domains, without needing to be the technical expert. Across programmes, this can include for example:
- Ability to get up to speed quickly on an unfamiliar technical domain, asking the right questions rather than already knowing the answers.
- Sufficient grounding in data engineering concepts to interrogate progress, spot risk, and have credible conversations with a senior engineering team;
- Understanding information governance well enough to track dependencies, identify blockers and know when to elevate – without needing to be an IG expert;
- Being able to reason effectively across areas such as dynamics of software and digital markets, including vendor incentives, market failures and routes to influence behaviour;
- Triangulating product development decisions & prioritisation, drawing on input from multi‑disciplinary stakeholders.
Use this understanding to inform programme strategy, delivery decisions and stakeholder discussions.

Practice development and business contribution

Contribute to the development of Social Finance’s data and digital practice, including shaping approaches, tools and ways of working.
Support business development by identifying opportunities, developing proposals and building long‑term client relationships.
Act as a business owner within the team, contributing to both impact and commercial sustainability.

About you

We are looking for individuals whose interests and experience align with the ambitions of our impact strategy to bring data & digital skills to delivering complex systems change.

A clear and sustained interest in data & digital transformation, with motivation to work in this space long‑term.
Experience leading or contributing to large, complex, long‑running technical programmes, including working with multi‑disciplinary teams.
Demonstrable experience working in environments where progress depends on influencing multiple stakeholders rather than direct delivery control.
Strong programme management capability, including managing ambiguity, interdependencies, phased delivery and evolving scope.
Ability to reason about and communicate complex technical and commercial concepts to non‑specialist audiences.
Strong stakeholder management skills, with credibility engaging senior external partners.
Experience leading and developing teams, delivering impact through others.

The following experience would be advantageous but is not required:

Product management.
Human‑centred design.
Experience managing delivery across geographically distributed or multi‑stakeholder implementations.
Experience working in or for the public sector.
Experience in one or more of Social Finance’s impact areas (Children & Young People, Health & Social Care, Employment & Skills, and Housing & Homelessness).

About Social Finance

We are an ambitious not for profit organisation that helps to design, fund and scale better solutions to complex social problems. Our vision is a fairer world where together we unleash the potential of people and communities.

We do this by working in partnership with local and national governments, funders, communities and the social sector to tackle complex and enduring social problems in the UK and across the world. Our skills include financial analysis, data and digital insight, outcomes‑focused partnerships, strategy, research and design. We combine these specialisms in different ways to address specific social challenges. We create effective solutions that blend the expertise of communities and professionals to deliver better outcomes in issues such as homelessness, domestic abuse, children’s services, health, employment and skills.

Our multidisciplinary team of over 120 people comes from diverse backgrounds in the public, private and charity sectors, all sharing a passion for making change happen. We provide a high‑quality training and development programme in‑house with great opportunities for career progression. We’re a friendly and intellectually curious bunch, always up for a debate.

Our work improves the lives of people and communities in the UK and across the world. We are experts in systems change – shifting the way a whole system works around a specific social issue in order to ensure long‑lasting change. Examples include:

Employment & skills: Scaling evidence‑based employment services through IPS Grow.
Health & social care: Investing in health transformation, such as in End‑of‑Life Care services.
Children & young people: Maximising access to education by building more inclusive systems.
Housing & homelessness: Developing innovative funding models to help meet government new homes supply.

Our approach is a collaborative one, where we bring the best capabilities and people from across the organisation together to solve the challenges we face.

Our values

Everyone at Social Finance believes that change for communities is possible. To help us achieve it, we have three core values that guide everything we do. We are curious, empathetic and pioneering.

Working at Social Finance

The fixed salary for this position is £70,000 per annum. Working for a mission driven organisation is more than just what we pay though, it’s about our culture, our approach and what else we offer.

Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

We actively encourage applications from under‑represented and minoritised groups, including those with lived experience of the social issues we are working to address. We are an equal opportunities employer.

We support a range of flexible working options and welcome UK based applications from outside of London/the Southeast so far as they can meet the in‑person meeting requirements for the role. We can also accommodate secondments and part‑time working.

We work on some projects where our clients may require different levels of DBS checking for our employees. Candidates deemed suitable for a role after interview will be asked to declare any unspent convictions to ensure that we are able to resource them to projects appropriately.

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Posted: July 10th, 2026