Data Solutions Lead

At Honda we embrace inclusion in our various policies, so whilst our contracts state that the hours are as required to fulfil the role with a minimum of 35 hours per week, we offer flexibility for when you work.  The regular office hours are 08:00 – 16:00 Monday to Thursday with a half hour lunch break & 08:00 – 13:00 on a Friday.  However, we offer flexibility of when you work with our daily flex-time start of between 07:00 and 11:00 providing that there is no business requirement.

Whilst there is no contractual right to work from home, the flexibility we offer is that you can request to work from home 2 days per week, again providing there is no business requirement to attend the office.

Role: 
Honda Motor Europe is seeking a Data Solutions Lead to help industrialise critical reporting and data processes across the business. This role is ideal for a hands on data professional who thrives at the intersection of business problem solving, data engineering, and measurable impact. You will personally build and ship working solutions, moving from problem to pipeline to proven outcome fast.

You will work closely with senior stakeholders to identify high value, manual, and Excel heavy reporting processes, and design and build robust, automated, and auditable data pipelines to replace them. In the early stages of the role, you will focus on a small number of high impact use cases, delivering solutions yourself, reducing reporting cycle times, improving data quality, and demonstrating clear value, before scaling these approaches more broadly across the organisation.

This role does not own enterprise data platforms or IT operations. Instead, it works in close partnership with central IT and Architecture teams, retaining end to end ownership of the business solution, to deliver business led data outcomes.

Main Responsibilities: 

• Work directly with business stakeholders to understand pain points in reporting and data processes, particularly manual and Excel heavy workflows.
• Document as is processes end to end, quantifying effort, risks, and failure points to define clear, outcome based success criteria.
• Design to be processes and target data models that support business outcomes, auditability, and reporting requirements.
• Build and maintain automated data ingestion and transformation pipelines using approved enterprise platforms.
• Replace Excel based ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), macros, and manual reconciliations with robust, repeatable automated workflows.
• Implement data quality rules, reconciliation logic, and data lineage to ensure outputs are trusted and auditable.
• Establish basic operational monitoring, including data freshness checks, run health, and exception handling, in partnership with IT teams.
• Create curated, reusable datasets that act as trusted sources for reporting and analytics (e.g. Power BI).
• Validate outputs with business users to ensure usability, consistency, and confidence in results.
• Drive continuous improvement by identifying and delivering automations that reduce cycle time, manual effort, and data errors.

Qualifications, skills and experience: 
Required

• Strong experience combining business analysis with hands on data engineering to automate manual and Excel heavy processes. 
• SQL experience and programming experience on Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, or an equivalent modern data platform. 
• Proven delivery of automated data solutions with measurable impact (e.g. reduced cycle time, lower error rates). 
• Experience designing and optimising data ingestion and transformation pipelines. 
• Practical experience implementing data quality controls, version control, and basic DevOps practices. 
• Ability to map and simplify complex processes and communicate clearly with non technical stakeholders. 
• Strong documentation skills, comfortable producing clear reports, presentations, and working materials. 
• Outcome focused mindset; prioritises delivery, works through ambiguity, and personally ships a working first version quickly, then iterates, delivering clear business benefits (time saved, quality improvement, reduced manual effort).
• Hands on problem solving, ability to understand data, and continuous learning.

Desirable

• Experience with Data Build Tool or similar transformation frameworks; familiar with data contracts and catalogues or lineage concepts.
• Proven experience building curated datasets for BI and analytics.
• Experience automating regulatory, sustainability or management reporting. 
• Knowledge of process improvement methods (e.g., Lean, Six Sigma) and experience with Agile delivery.
• Experience integrating application programming interfaces or third‑party data sources.

Honda is committed to the principle of equal opportunity in the workplace for all employees, temporary workers, contractors, applicants and visitors. Honda also encourages respect for the individual differences and talents of others while making full use of one's own abilities, based on Honda's philosophy of respect for the individual.

At Honda, we value and celebrate diversity and are committed to being a fair, non-discriminatory company that promotes and welcomes the uniqueness and differences of people around the world. We recognise that a diverse workforce allows for different ideas and perspectives, and we encourage everyone to share them. We strive to foster a culture of belonging that is consistent with Honda's core values and lived out in the way we work and respect each other. For us at Honda, diversifying our workforce means increasing its overall strength by providing people with equal opportunities - regardless of personal characteristics or previous careers.

This commitment flows directly from the Honda philosophy and the belief that we are all working towards a common goal. Honda recruits, hires, trains and promotes the most qualified/experienced individuals at all levels without regard to race, origin, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or any other protected characteristic.