Manager, R&D Data Steward

General Description:

The Manager R&D Data Steward is responsible for ensuring the quality, integrity, consistency, and governance of R&D data across Research, Clinical, Safety, and Regulatory domains. This role serves as the custodian of data meaning and trust, owning business definitions, metadata, data profiling insights, and data quality rules for critical R&D data products.

The Data Steward partners closely with data owners, data engineering, analytics, and governance teams to ensure data is fit for purpose, compliant with regulatory requirements, and discoverable for analytics and AI use cases. Also, help oversee the implementation and management of MDM initiatives to ensure accurate, consistent, and complete data across the organization for critical master domains relevant to R&D.

Essential Functions of the job:

• Governance & Standards

• Lead the maintenance of a comprehensive data governance framework

• Define and socialize R&D data policies, standards, and FAIR-aligned procedures

• Lead the maintenance of the enterprise data catalog and metadata repository.

• Enforce role-based access controls and secure data-sharing protocols across initiatives.

• Evaluate and implement tools and technologies that facilitate effective data management and stewardship

• Data Stewardship & Quality Management

• Act as a data steward for MDM, ensuring data quality, integrity, and compliance with defined standards for critical Master domains relevant to R&D

• Own and maintain business definitions, Critical Data Elements (CDEs), and domain metadata for R&D data assets.

• Conduct and interpret data profiling analyses to assess completeness, consistency, validity, uniqueness, and conformity of R&D datasets.

• Identify anomalies, patterns, and data quality risks through structured profiling of source and curated data.

• Design and manage comprehensive data enrichment workflows (cleansing, validation, enhancements).

• Establish quality rules, KPIs, and SLAs; monitor performance and drive remediation.

• Oversee critical data pipelines, validate ingestion-to-delivery flows, and resolve escalated issues.

• Leverage Informatica suite as well as Databricks to perform Data profiling, Data Cataloging & implementing Data Quality checks following established standards/frameworks

• Collaboration & Enablement

• Partner with R&D Data Governance leadership, business units, and IT to translate requirements into scalable data solutions.

• Facilitate and lead cross-team workshops for root-cause analysis and metadata improvements.

• Foster a culture of data stewardship throughout the organization and provide training and support to data owners and stewards

• Develop strategies and advanced data-sharing artifacts (interactive lineage maps, domain dashboards) to maintain data lineage and metadata management for better understanding and traceability and support analytics and AI.

• Compliance & Risk Management

• Ensure adherence to GxP and non-GxP regulations through proactive governance controls.

• Lead audit preparation and provide documented evidence of governance activities.

• Risk Management, Communication & Change Support

• Proactively identify and assess data-related risks; develop and implement mitigation strategies.

• Conduct regular reviews and audits of data governance practices to ensure adherence to policies and continuous improvement.

• Serve as the primary liaison for complex data inquiries and status reporting.

• Champion change management-develop training, stewardship workshops, conduct demos, and drive stakeholder adoption and resolve data definition, quality, and metadata gaps

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Mentor and develop a team of data stewards and analysts to foster progressive data governance practices and a culture of data stewardship

Computer Skills:

• Microsoft Applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project)

• Informatica CDGC. CDQ, Databricks, SQL, Python (preferred), Reltio MDM

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of experience or Master's degree and 4+ years of experience in Life Sciences, Data Management, Information Systems, or related field or equivalent in a health-related field.

• 5+ years' experience in data stewardship, data governance, MDM and related roles -preferably in Biotech or Pharmaceutical R&D.

• Proven track record of defining governance frameworks and leading cross-functional teams while mastering critical master data domains relevant to R&D.

• Expert knowledge of R&D data domains, FAIR principles, and regulatory requirements.

• Strong understanding of data management principles, practices, and hands on with data governance tools/technologies (Informatica, Collibra) and MDM platforms (Reltio).

• Excellent mentoring, negotiation, and stakeholder-management skills.

Travel: Minimal

Education Required:

Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of experience or Master's degree and 4+ years of experience or equivalent in a health-related field

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.