Head of Data Acqusitions. Höfuðborgarsvæði. Islandia

We are building something essential

Stratis is an Icelandic-based startup developing a strategic platform designed for the people tasked with seeing what's coming, from civil protection agencies to national defence organizations. Our system fuses temporal and geospatial data to power real-time awareness, historical insight and future-facing prediction.

We're small, but moving fast. We're building for European governments, and we are now looking for someone to lead our data acquisition team.

The Role

We are looking for a Head of Data Acquisition to design and lead the systems that fuel our data-driven intelligence platform. This is not a "data sourcing" role in the commercial sense. This is about building and scaling the technical infrastructure that collects, processes and maintains huge, multi-lingual datasets from  varied sources.

You'll lead the strategy and architecture behind web scraping, ETL pipelines and real-time data ingestion systems. You will be responsible for our data being complete, clean and compliant across highly varied environments (cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped).

What You'll Do

- Lead the data acquisition strategy, defining how we collect, enrich and maintain diverse very large datasets across multiple domains.

- Architect and oversee very large-scale data ingestions, scraping and warehousing systems built for resilience and scale.

- Build and maintain a small, high-performing engineering team focused on ETL, data pipelines and automation.

- Maintain regulatory compliance, security and privacy across multiple, multi-continental jurisdictions.

- Design and monitor custom crawlers and API integrations for hard-to-access data sources, including social platforms and open-source intelligence repositories.

- Drive innovation in data processing, storage and retrieval, from raw acquisitions to analytics-ready datasets.

What You Bring

- Extensive experience in data engineering, web scraping and very large-scale data systems.

- Proven ability to design and deploy resilient ETL architectures handling multilingual and multi-format data.

- Hands-on experience with Python, Ruby, Go, Javascript, Typescript, C and Rust for data pipelines and system automation. Deep familiarity with Linux based cluster infrastructure ( on-prem Linux servers).

- Solid grounding in machine learning data preparation, versioning and validation pipelines (PyTorch, XGBoost, LLMs etc.)

- Background in secure data operations, including compliance, encryption and network hardening.

- Experience working with governmental, financial or research institutions across cultural and regulatory boundaries.

- Exceptional communication skills, ability to translate technical complexity into operational clarity.

- International technological, governmental, and business experience across multiple continents and widely varying regulatory and work environments.

- Experience leading small start up teams during early growth phases.

- A fundamental understanding of shifting global political structures, especially with a focus on Europe.

It is a full time job, work hours are regular office hours.

Wages according to collective agreements with VISKA Union / SA

Please apply by filling in an online application here: https://form.vinnumalastofnun.is/eures and put "251024-01" in the field for employer.

Last application date is November 26th, 2025.

Why Join Us

You'll be responsible for one of the most foundational elements of our mission, transforming global and chaotic data into operational clarity.

You'll lead a team with the humble mission of helping governments, civil defence agencies and global enterprises make sense of the world's information flows.

If you thrive in complex systems, value intellectual autonomy and want your engineering to actually matter, this is your place.