Senior Manager, Data Team

About the role

VML, part of WPP, is a leading creative company that combines brand experience, customer experience, and commerce, creating connected brands to drive growth. VML is celebrated for its innovative and human first, award-winning work for blue chip client partners including AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Ford, Microsoft, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, and Wendy's. The agency is recognized by the Forrester Wave™ Reports, as a Leader among Marketing Creative and Content Service Providers, Commerce Services, Global Digital Experience Services, Global Marketing Services and, most recently, Marketing Measurement & Optimization. In addition, VML's specialist health network, VML Health, is one of the world's largest and most awarded health agencies. VML's global network is powered by 26,000 talented people across 55+ markets, with principal offices in Kansas City, New York, Detroit, London, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney. About WPP WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company - powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com . VML Luxembourg VML Luxembourg is one of the leading Amazon consulting agencies in Europe. Offering 360° services for Amazon, we have a diverse range of products and services in various sectors to ensure long-term sales growth, ranging from creating multilingual content and listings to all aspects of advertising, including sales promotion, PPC and programmatic campaigns. We are part of WPP, the world's largest digital media agency, and manage WPP's European Center of Excellence for Amazon (ACE) dedicated to maximising performance, driving sales and building brands on the Amazon platform. We're looking for a Senior Manager to lead our Data Services team in Luxembourg. This is a senior player-manager role at the intersection of technical leadership, commercial delivery, and client engagement. You'll lead a cross-functional team of Data Scientists, Senior BI Engineers, and Data Analysts, and serve as the primary point of contact for internal stakeholders and external clients, from scoping and prioritisation through execution and impact. This is not a purely managerial role. You'll stay hands-on, building, debugging, and shipping solutions when speed demands it or technical complexity requires your senior judgment. We're looking for someone who pairs deep technical fundamentals in data, engineering, statistics, and ML with a modern, AI-assisted way of working. You use AI tools to move faster and think bigger, but your instincts and quality bar are rooted in genuine technical mastery, not reliant on it. You can tell when an AI-generated output is wrong, why it's wrong, and how to fix it. You'll partner closely with IT to ensure the infrastructure, tooling, and delivery pipelines your team relies on are robust, scalable, and fit for purpose.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & People Management
• Lead, mentor, and develop the team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Set clear priorities, allocate workload, and remove blockers so the team can do its best work.
• Run regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations.
• Champion an AI-assisted working culture, encouraging intelligent use of AI tools while holding the bar on rigour, validation, and engineering quality.
• Create an environment where team members own their domains and grow toward greater autonomy and seniority.
• Agile Delivery & Team Rhythm
• Introduce and sustain light Scrum practices sized to the team, lean and purposeful, never bureaucratic.
• Own the team's JIRA workflow: groomed backlog, clear and actionable tickets, transparent tracking from intake to delivery.
• Facilitate standups, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives, focused, time-boxed, and genuinely useful.
• Use sprint cadences to create predictable delivery rhythms and give stakeholders reliable visibility into progress.
• Continuously refine team processes based on retrospective learnings, velocity patterns, and stakeholder feedback.
• Business & Client Engagement
• Act as the primary point of contact for internal stakeholders (Media, Content, Account teams) and external clients on all Data Services requests.
• Lead discovery and scoping, translating ambiguous business questions into structured problem statements, delivery plans, and success criteria.
• Maintain a prioritised backlog, making transparent trade-offs that balance client urgency, strategic value, and team capacity.
• Manage stakeholder expectations across the delivery lifecycle, communicating progress,

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