Data Governance Lead

Title: Data Governance Lead
Location: Remote
Duration: 09 Months

Job Description:
The Data Governance Lead is responsible for establishing and operationalizing governance standards across the data ecosystem, with a strong emphasis on Databricks and Unity Catalog as foundational components of the platform. This role focuses on unifying fragmented data sources into a consistent, well-managed environment and partners closely with data engineering, platform teams, product teams, and business stakeholders to define policies, frameworks, and best practices that ensure compliance, security, and high data quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and own the data governance framework, including policies, standards, metadata strategy, and data stewardship processes.
• Lead governance across cloud and analytics platforms with priority on Databricks and Unity Catalog, followed by AWS data services and Dataiku.
• Define catalog structure, classification models, tagging, and access rules across multiple business domains.
• Implement metadata management, lineage tracking, and data quality controls to improve trust and usability.
• Drive unification of data across fragmented systems by designing scalable models, harmonized definitions, and reusable governance patterns.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance (e.g., PII, GxP, HIPAA where applicable).
• Oversee data access controls, entitlements, and policy enforcement across analytic environments.
• Establish processes for issue management, remediation, and continuous improvement.
• Mentor data stewards and support adoption of governance standards across business teams.
• Support platform modernization and enable analytics, AI/ML, automation, and self-service use cases.

Client Job Description:

Required Skills & Experience

• 7+ years in data governance, data management, or enterprise data architecture.
• Hands-on expertise with Databricks and Unity Catalog (catalog design, access policies, lineage, classification/tagging) as the primary platform requirement.
• Experience with AWS data services (e.g., S3, Glue, Lake Formation, Redshift, IAM).
• Experience with data governance workflows, tooling, and model management.
• Strong understanding of MDM, metadata management, and data quality frameworks.
• Proven success governing data across fragmented systems, complex pipelines, and multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
• Familiarity with data privacy and compliance (PII, PHI, GxP, GDPR, etc.).
• Ability to work across business and technical teams, influence without authority, and build alignment.
• Excellent communication skills, with ability to translate governance concepts for non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in life sciences, healthcare, or regulated industries.
• Background with product-oriented data platforms or customer-facing data services.
• Knowledge of workflow tools (Jira, Confluence) and governance platforms (Collibra, Alation, data.world preferred but not required).
• Certifications in Databricks, AWS, or data governance frameworks.

 
 
At SPECTRAFORCE, we are committed to maintaining a workplace that ensures fair compensation and wage transparency in adherence with all applicable state and local laws. This position’s starting pay is: $ 50.00/hr.