Principal – Data & AI Integration

Mintel is the world’s leading market intelligence agency. Increasingly, our clients don’t come to Mintel; Mintel goes to them. They use our research and data inside their own systems — through AI assistants and agents, APIs, data feeds, dashboards and internal research tools — and combine it with their own business data and third-party data. Clients who work this way stay with us longer and get more from us, and the integrations that make it possible are already live.

This is the next frontier for Mintel, and we are hiring someone to make it excellent. You will understand how clients integrate Mintel into their own ecosystems and make sure what we deliver doesn’t just work, but fits the way they actually work: from the question a client asks in their own tool, through what Mintel returns, to what they do with the answer next.

This is not a traditional product or UX role. Mintel does not own the end user experience in an integration; our clients do. What we own is what we send: how our content, data and capabilities are structured, described and delivered so they are usable, trustworthy and recognisably Mintel in environments we don’t control.

A large part of your time will be spent with clients: understanding their workflows and what they are trying to achieve, seeing how Mintel actually shows up in their work, and removing the obstacles that stand between them and the value. The rest is turning what you learn into what we return. Our engineers own the integration’s code; you own what it should return.

You will work hand in hand with our Senior Director, Data Product. Together you decide what is on offer: she owns whether the data is ready and reliable; you own how it works from the client’s side and whether it achieves their goal. Neither ships without the other. You will also work daily with our engineers, architects and product managers.

This is a senior individual-contributor role. It carries no team. It is principal-level because the work has to move engineers, product managers and the data team without authority over any of them.

What you’ll do

Understand clients and what they are really trying to achieve

• Take a consultative approach: run client discovery, observe workflows, and dig past the requested feature to the outcome behind it. Most clients want to innovate faster; the interesting part is how differently each one goes about it.
• Understand how clients combine Mintel with their own and third-party data, and where their systems and processes get in the way.
• Decide what we standardise and what we tailor: find the patterns that work for many clients and recognise when an individual client genuinely needs something different.
• Build a library of real use cases, case studies and representative client scenarios that shapes product decisions and equips our commercial teams.

Shape the integration experience

• Own the integration-facing contract, in partnership with Data Product: what we expose, what it is called, how it is described and what each element carries, so that whatever a client’s system composes is clear, traceable and valuable.
• Set the standard for a good integration experience and review new Mintel capabilities against it, so integration is part of discovery rather than an afterthought.
• Collaborate closely with Data Product and Engineering to turn client evidence into the roadmap and into real improvements, not just recommendations.

Evaluate and improve

• Test how Mintel capabilities actually appear and perform in representative client environments, before and after every change.
• Watch what assistants and systems actually call, where they fail and where they fall silent, and keep a set of real client questions to run against every change. An assistant that stops finding Mintel useful never tells you.
• When something comes out wrong, work out whether the cause is the integration-facing definition, the returned output, the data or the client’s implementation, and bring in the right owner.

Develop best practice and enablement

• Give clients practical guidance and examples when they are still shaping their integration approach, without designing or building their specific system.
• Help Sales and Account Management understand the shift from websites to integrations: what is possible, what is not, and which delivery route fits which need.
• Contribute to Mintel’s thought leadership on integration experiences.

What we’re looking for

This role combines client discovery, product thinking, information design and technical fluency. We are specifically looking for a mix of experience across technical solution consulting, API-first or integration products, and AI-assisted or data-rich products, in whatever combination you have built it. Few people have all of it from one job; most of the people we want have crossed at least one boundary. 

You will need:

• A consultative mindset and an appetite for clients. Expect around 30% of your time talking to clients and, where it helps, travelling to see their workflows first-hand. You are genuinely interested in unblocking individual clients, and you turn each one into something that works for many. You have to want this, not tolerate it.
• Technical fluency. You can read an integration and the data it returns, and test it the way a client’s system would. You understand APIs, MCP, AI assistants, authentication and data exchange, and you pick up new tools quickly as the landscape changes. You are not here to build the integration; our engineers do that, and they will treat you as a peer because you understand their work.
• Information design. You can look at the raw data behind an answer and say whether a client reading it would trust it, and restructure it so they would. This is design applied to data, not to screens.
• Product judgement. You balance client needs, business goals, data constraints and technical reality, and explain the trade-offs clearly.
• Influence without authority. You create alignment across Product, Data Product, Engineering, Architecture and Commercial teams, and you communicate well with technical and non-technical audiences, including clients.

It helps if you have:

• Worked on API, platform, data-sharing or integration products, or on products consumed inside customer-controlled tools.
• Experience with AI-assisted workflows, enterprise search or knowledge platforms.
• Developed standards, case studies or practices that other teams adopted.

Before you apply, four things to know: 

• This is an individual-contributor role. There is no team to manage, now or planned.
• There are no screens. The design work is in what our integrations return: the data, its structure and how it is described.
• You decide what the integrations should return; our engineers build them. If you would rather be building, this isn’t the role.
• The role will change shape as the technology and our clients do. You will be defining it as you go, not inheriting a settled job.

What you'll get in return: 

• A culture that supports true collaboration whilst embracing remote working with a company wide hybrid working week.
• Approach to personal development where we encourage individuals to grow and share what they’ve learned.
• Social events, both within the department and across the company
• Generous holiday allowance with the opportunity to buy back additional holiday.
• A day off to celebrate your birthday
• Giving back is part of our culture with this in mind Mintel gives each employee 2 days per year to give to a worthwhile cause.

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