Data Governance Lead

CaptionCall by Sorenson • Salt Lake City, UT

17h

About The Position

The Data Governance Lead is accountable for establishing and scaling the organization’s data governance framework. This includes drafting policies, implementing processes, stewardship models, and enabling technologies that improve data quality, metadata management, lineage, and accountability. The role will be responsible for ensuring that the company abides by corporate governance policies, procedures and practices and complies with regulatory requirements.

Critically, this position will identify and address current-state gaps and drive an implementation roadmap for the execution of immediate priorities, including:

Standing up a governance organization and accountability and control
framework
Establishing and maintaining data classification for all data sources
Updating data security and privacy policies to meet enterprise-wide
requirements beyond security operations.
Developing standard operating procedures across all data policies and
standards, including AI acceptable use, role-based access controls, master
data management, data classification, quality, and lifecycle management.
Enhancing incident response, breach notification, and disaster recovery
frameworks with data-specific details
Enabling Governance-as-code (in policies and controls) to help integrate
governance framework with AI platforms

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in data governance, data management, or enterprise information management roles.
• Experience implementing or scaling data governance frameworks within mid-to-large organizations.
• Deep understanding of data governance and management frameworks (e.g., DAMA-DMBOK, DCAM, COBIT).
• Strong knowledge of data quality, metadata management, master data, reference data, and lineage practices.
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks impacting data (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, SOX).
• Experience aligning data governance policies with security, privacy, and compliance requirements.
• Proven ability to document, operationalize, and continuously improve governance processes.
• Hands-on experience with governance and workflow automation tools (e.g., Jira, M365 and AI tools).
• Analytical acumen to measure governance performance and drive actionable improvements.
• Excellent communication skills to influence both technical and business stakeholders.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to navigate competing priorities and regulatory requirements.
• Minimum: Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Business Administration, Data Management, or related field.

Nice To Haves

• Preferred: Master’s degree in Data Governance, Information Management, or related discipline.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable data governance frameworks, and policies covering classification, metadata, data quality, stewardship, retention, access, and lifecycle management.
• Design and deploy tooling to establish enterprise-wide data catalog to enable common & single abstraction layer for engineering and analytics,
• Update and extend existing security-focused policies to cover enterprise data governance (NIST-aligned).
• Build practical SOPs for data quality, classification, lifecycle, and retention.
• Develop policies and training for AI acceptable use, master data, and third-party data sharing.
• Ensure governance standards are maintained, reviewed, and adapted in response to evolving regulations and business needs.
• Gaining a working understanding of all regulatory and legal requirements related to your role/work product and ensuring that those requirements are met.
• Define AI inference data usage standards, RAG data ingestion controls and PII detection, redaction and tokenization prior to AI exposore
• Define governance procedures for 3rd party AI providers and SaaS AI data usage focusing on tenancy, retention and contractual usage protections
• Operationalize data governance processes across the data lifecycle, ensuring compliance, accountability, and traceability.
• Enable automation of governance workflows using established platforms and recommended AI tools
• Define and maintain dashboards and reporting mechanisms to measure compliance, policy adoption, and data quality outcomes.
• Implement automated monitoring for data governance compliance.
• Establish regular audit processes for data handling practices and vendor compliance
• Partner with engineering and cyber security team to embed governance policies upstream into AI pipelines, DevSecOps and CI/CD pipelines and policy-as-code frameworks
• Serve as the primary liaison between the data governance function and enterprise functions including Security, Privacy, Compliance, Audit, and Legal.
• Partner with Data Owners, Data Stewards, and business stakeholders to define roles, responsibilities, and accountability for data.
• Facilitate governance forums, data councils, and stewardship communities of practice to ensure alignment and transparency.
• Provide regular reporting to executive leadership on data governance compliance status.
• Interface with regulatory bodies and external auditors as required.
• Define and manage governance KPIs and OKRs, including data quality scores, issue resolution cycle times, and policy adoption metrics.
• Identify and close gaps in governance coverage, execution, and tool adoption.
• Stay current on industry best practices, emerging data technologies (AI/ML, cloud-native data platforms), and evolving regulatory landscapes.
• Conduct regular risk assessments of data governance program effectiveness.
• Implement continuous improvement processes based on incident analysis and regulatory changes
• Help establish monitor controls for AI data pipelines, 3rd party LLM integration layer and enterprise AI platforms

Benefits

• Paid Vacation Time and Paid Sick Time and Paid Holidays
• 401k 6% match with immediate vesting
• Nationwide Medical Insurance plans and coverage (Medical, Dental/Orthodontia, Vision)
• TeleDoc
• HSA company match
• 3 Medical plan options including a Low Deductible PPO Medical Plan Offering
• Employee Assistance Program
• Engaged Employee Resource Groups
• Outstanding Learning and Career Development Opportunities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level