Head of Water Quality & Scientific Services
Affinity Water · Hatfield, United Kingdom · hybrid
Lead the Future of Water Quality in the UK
At Affinity Water, we supply safe, high-quality drinking water to more than 3.9 million customers, delivering around 950 million litres every day across the South East of England. As the UK's largest water-only company, we are committed to protecting public health, safeguarding the environment, and investing in a resilient future.
We're now seeking an exceptional leader to join us as Head of Water Quality & Scientific Services; a critical role responsible for shaping our water quality strategy, leading scientific excellence, and ensuring regulatory compliance from source to tap.
The Opportunity
This is a high-profile leadership position where you'll serve as Affinity Water's senior authority on drinking water quality, providing expert guidance to the Executive Team, Board, regulators, and industry stakeholders. You'll lead a multidisciplinary team of approximately 120 scientific, technical and operational professionals, driving a culture of excellence, innovation and continuous improvement.
From strategic investment planning to incident response, you'll play a pivotal role in ensuring we continue to deliver safe, reliable water to millions of customers while navigating an increasingly complex regulatory and environmental landscape.
What You'll Be Doing
- Leading Affinity Water's drinking water quality strategy and assurance programme.
- Acting as the organisation's principal adviser on water quality, public health and regulatory matters.
- Building strong relationships with the Drinking Water Inspectorate, Defra, public health authorities and industry partners.
- Overseeing scientific services, sampling programmes and laboratory operations, including maintaining UKAS accreditation.
- Driving operational assurance, audits and continuous improvement activities across the business.
- Providing leadership during significant water quality incidents, ensuring effective response, investigation and corrective action.
- Influencing major capital investment decisions and asset strategies to enhance water quality outcomes.
- Developing future capability by leading, coaching and inspiring a high-performing team of experts.
About You
We're looking for an influential and credible senior leader who combines scientific expertise with strategic vision.
You'll bring:
- Significant leadership experience within drinking water quality, environmental science, public health, or another highly regulated technical environment.
- A degree in a relevant scientific or technical discipline.
- Experience leading large multidisciplinary teams, complex budgets and organisational transformation.
- Deep knowledge of drinking water quality regulations and risk management.
- Experience managing major operational, public health or regulatory incidents.
- Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence at Executive, Board and regulatory level.
- Excellent communication, judgement and decision-making capability.
- Chartered status and experience within UKAS-accredited laboratory environments would be advantageous.
Why Join Affinity Water?
This is more than a leadership role. It's an opportunity to:
- Protect public health and environmental outcomes on a regional scale.
- Shape strategic investment decisions for AMP8 and beyond.
- Influence national conversations on water quality and regulation.
- Lead a respected scientific function with a strong industry reputation.
- Make a lasting impact on the communities we serve.
Benefits:- Competitive salary dependant on skills and experience
- Learning and development opportunities, including mentoring and a range of formal courses and open learning resources.
- Entry into the company annual bonus scheme.
- Annual leave from 26-30 rising with length of service, and the option to purchase up to 5 extra days.
- A ‘Celebration Day’ in addition to public holidays that people can use to celebrate a religious festival or other occasion that is important to them.
- A generous 'double match pension scheme' that doubles the contributions you make (company contribution capped at 12%)
- We offer a range of family benefits including enhanced Maternity, Adoption, Paternity, Shared Parental Leave, Fertility Support Leave and up to 5 full or 10 half days of paid Carers Leave.
- Menopause policy and Reasonable Adjustment policy to help everyone perform at their best.
- Access to our Wellbeing Centre with support for looking after your physical and mental health.
- Discounts at a Range of Retail Outlets through our Tap4Perks scheme
- Discounts on Dental and Medical Insurance through our Tap4Perks scheme through salary sacrifice
- Up to 4 Affinity days a year to volunteer in the community.
- Life Assurance.
Disability ConfidentAs a Disability Confident employer, we’re committed to offering interviews to disabled candidates who meet the essential criteria and opt in on the application form. Ask the Talent Acquisition lead for the full job description to see all the criteria. If we have a very high volume of applicants and we’re not able to offer interviews to all, we’ll take a fair and proportionate number of disabled candidates through.
Affinity Water recognises the benefits of greater diversity in our workforce to better reflect the communities we serve. We are committed to building a more inclusive culture where every member of our workforce can thrive.
You can find out what it’s like to work at Affinity Water through our career site https://www.affinitywatercareers.co.uk/ where our colleagues share their career development stories and you can get a feel for our company culture.