Interim Tech & Data Lead, Tony's Open Chain (fixed-term contract)

Job description

We are looking for a Tech & Data Lead, Tony’s Open Chain to join our team based in Amsterdam as a parental leave cover for a period of 10 months starting mid-February 2026. The primary goal is to ensure management of the full technology and data landscape for Tony’s Open Chain across Europe and West Africa.

Tony's Open Chain is an industry-led initiative, founded by Tony's Chocolonely, that helps chocolate brands transform their cocoa supply chains and become sustainability frontrunners. Tony’s 5 Sourcing Principles take a farmer-first approach in cocoa that prioritizes human rights and environmental protection, aiming to reverse institutionalized inequality. By combining these 5 Sourcing Principles – traceability, higher prices, long-term commitments, strong farmer partnerships, and enhanced quality and productivity – Tony's Open Chain seeks to end structural poverty and establish more equitable relationships with cocoa cooperatives in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.

As Tech & Data Lead, Tony’s Open Chain you are responsible for shaping and executing the technology and data strategy. In this role you bridge engineering, data, and business functions — ensuring that systems, platforms, and data assets are reliable, scalable, secure, and aligned with business goals. The landscape comprises of lean components for data entry and validation, established frameworks for financial and commercial process management while relying on modern integration mechanisms to connect all functional elements both of internal and external nature. It supports all programs, including traceability, productivity, deforestation analysis, child labor monitoring and remediation. The collected data is loaded, transformed, and analysed via MS Fabric and PowerBi.

You act as a hands-on technical expert, a strategic thinker, and a cross-functional leader. By owning the delivery roadmap and overseeing its full execution you proactively challenge the business needs to prioritize the developments that bring the most value for Tony’s Open Chain on its growth trajectory. You take on a leadership role to ensure the strategy gets operationalized, the roadmap delivered, and roadblocks removed. This means you proactively look for solutions and critically assess what you need to be successful in terms of team, systems, processes, and vendors.

You will steer the internal tech and data team who covers QA, configurations, support, and data analysis while aligning with tech and data engineers. You work with the leadership of the Tony’s Open Chain, IT, and Data team to make this happen. You are part of the IT team and report to the Head of IT. At the same time, you are also an active member of the Tony's Open Chain team.

Here is what you will do

• Define and drive the overall delivery roadmap based on a refined technology and data strategy, while managing budgets against delivery.
• Oversee architecture decisions for applications, cloud infrastructure, and integration.
• Ensure systems are scalable, secure, and aligned with industry best practices.
• Evaluate and adopt (emerging) technologies where relevant.
• Establish data governance, quality standards, and compliance frameworks.
• Oversee data pipelines, warehousing, analytics platforms, and BI tools.
• Ensure data is accessible, reliable, and used effectively across teams.
• Lead and mentor engineering, data, and analytics teams.
• Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to translate needs into functional solutions.
• Oversee end-to-end delivery of technical and data projects by robust delivery planning, refinement, testing, and roll-out coordination.
• Manage vendor relationships, budgets, and timelines.
• Implement policies for secure data handling and system access.

Job requirements

• Excellent project management and prioritization skills.
• Proven experience leading technical and/or data teams, ideally in scale up environments.
• Ability to translate business needs into functional solutions acquired in a product management or business analysis role.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, especially in cross cultural setting (this role interacts a lot with the team in Cote d’Ivoire & Ghana). Speaking French is a plus.
• Strategic thinking with hands-on execution capability.
• We are all about being more in person than apart; this means we offer flexibility but see each other in the Amsterdam office on average 3 days a week. More is fine too!
• Believe wholeheartedly in Tony's Open Chain’s mission. You live our core values: outspoken, in it together, entrepreneurial, raise the bar and makes you smile.

Our benefits (the icing on the cake)

At Tony's you will get the opportunity to be part of something extraordinary; first and foremost, by making real impact in the world but also enjoying the nice benefits we provide as you help us succeed. We’re dedicated to enabling all Tonys to grow and develop their careers and therefore we offer training programs, regular feedback cycles, and coaching. We also offer a wide range of additional benefits, including a luxurious (vegetarian) lunch, inspirational team updates, unforgettable events and unlimited chocolate. But we also know chocolate won’t cover the bills, so we’ve made sure your salary is just as rewarding.