Senior Lead Data Governance Engineer

JOB SUMMARY:

Responsible for leading and directing the design, implementation, and maintenance of scalable, secure, and policy-compliant data governance frameworks across the enterprise. Drive governance initiatives from inception to deployment, ensuring high-quality metadata management, data lineage, classification, and access control. Collaborate closely with business stakeholders, engineering teams, architecture, legal, and product owners to deliver governance solutions that underpin enterprise data reliability, security, and compliance. Troubleshoot and optimize governance processes within a mature data ecosystem while driving continuous improvements. Execute configuration, integration, and lifecycle management of data governance platforms and tools, partnering with Infrastructure, Security, and Compliance teams to ensure alignment with enterprise standards and regulatory requirements.

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Leads the design and implementation of ongoing data governance practices across enterprise data platforms, ensuring the effective delivery of governance frameworks, metadata strategies, data quality standards, and compliance policies across both internal and external teams.

• Provides technical leadership and mentorship to data architects, engineers, data stewards, and external partners to enable the deployment of efficient, secure, and sustainable data governance solutions aligned with business objectives and regulatory requirements.

• Leads the prioritization, planning, design, and execution of data governance-related enhancements, including metadata management, data catalog integrations, lineage tracking, and access control policies. Partners with business and technical stakeholders to ensure governance efforts align with enterprise data strategy.

• Responsible for the resolution of governance-related issues, including data quality anomalies, lineage gaps, and metadata inconsistencies. Drives root cause analysis and implements long-term remediation strategies to maintain data integrity and trust.

• Monitors and supports the operation of governance tools and platforms to ensure they meet service level agreements and performance expectations. Continuously evaluates governance processes to optimize effectiveness, ensure audit readiness, and support evolving business needs.

• Understand and actively participate in Environmental, Health & Safety responsibilities by following established UDX policy, procedures, training, and team member involvement activities.

• Perform other duties as assigned.

EDUCATION:

• Bachelor's degree - Technical degree or highly relevant equivalent experience is required.

EXPERIENCE:

• 9+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data governance,

• 2+ years of designing and implementing technical data governance solutions at scale.

• Proficient in SQL and Python, with hands-on experience building scalable data pipelines and frameworks using tools such as Apache Airflow, dbt, or Prefect.

• Demonstrated expertise in data governance tools such as Collibra, Alation, Informatica, Apache Atlas, or Amundsen - including integration into data platforms and orchestration layers.

• Deep understanding of metadata management, data lineage tracking, data cataloging, and data classification frameworks.

• Proven experience implementing data privacy and compliance policies such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and knowledge of data security best practices (e.g., encryption, tokenization, row/column-level access controls).

• Strong familiarity with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, or Azure Synapse, and how to implement governance controls in those environments.

• Experience in working with IAM and RBAC/ABAC frameworks to enforce data access policies across diverse user roles.

• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional data initiatives across engineering, legal, security, analytics, and business units.

• Strong documentation, communication, and stakeholder management skills - capable of translating complex technical governance concepts for non-technical audiences.

• Experience working with scheduling, automation, file transfer, monitoring, alerting, notification and logging tools like Azure Data Factories, Airflow, NiFi, RunDeck, etc.

• Experience working in Linux environment.

• Experience with source control management such as Git and/or SVN.

• Strong knowledge of systems development and project management Agile methodologies/processes.

• Strong problem solving skills, and the ability to communicate complex concepts clearly and accurately.

• Experience interacting with Kafka and API/Service programming and transactional databases.

• Participate in an on-call rotation and available to work off-hours, holidays, and weekends.

• Strong interpersonal skills, with a demonstrated ability to make effective decisions while working through complex system issues.

• Must be able to utilize and effectively communicate functional and technical components of an initiative to applicable parties both verbally and through documentation.

• Coordinate the necessary operations documentation and standards required for compliance and identified best practices.

• Willingness to learn new technologies, tools, and approaches to problem-solving.

• Act as SME on regulatory compliance and data ethics in product development and data operations.

Your talent, skills and experience will be rewarded with a competitive compensation package.

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