Vlad Jiman, director of data, N Brown

Describe your career to date

At 31 years old, I’m super lucky to have had a whirlwind of a career to date, with the last 6 focused exclusively on data. I have worked for small and large, slow and crazy, thriving and struggling organisations, met exceptional people, had amazing mentors, and learned a lot from them. 

I joined THG as a customer scientist when there was no data strategy, data infrastructure or centralised data function to support this type of work. Over three years, I centralised, attracted, structured, and led a global workforce of 40+ colleagues across machine learning, experimentation, data engineering and BI as the head of data science. This team commercialised data products like anomaly and cyber-attack detection, micro-segmentation and personalisation, product and customer embeddings, advanced image search, fraud detection and natural language processing.

I then moved from the science to the engineering side, joining Pets at Home in 2019 as the group head of analytics platform and data engineering. Here, I established the data platform, engineering and visualisation capabilities as part of the group’s wider “petcare analytics for all” vision. This new 45-plus strong function delivered a transformation programme, including a best-in-class cloud-native analytics platform serving an internal audience of over 15,000, associated CRM and customer service tooling, and the technical capabilities and data-driven processes required to power the organisation’s award-winning VIP loyalty scheme. 

This uncommon mix of strategic, analytics and engineering expertise allowed me to join N Brown as the director of data in May 2022, reporting directly to the CEO, to lead and deliver the PLC and executive-board’s mission to “establish data as an asset to win”.