Data Governance Lead

Data Governance Lead

Join a winning team of innovative thinkers, seasoned mortgage professionals, and financial experts. Build your career at Planet—recognized as a Top Mortgage Employer by National Mortgage Professional.

Job Summary

The Data Governance Lead builds and runs Planet's enterprise data governance program and is accountable for making loan-level and enterprise data trusted, defensible, and fit for regulatory scrutiny. This role establishes who owns which data, what quality standard it must meet, where it came from, and who is permitted to see it, and holds business and technology accountable to those answers.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and operate the enterprise data governance program and operating model. Establish the governance framework, policies, and standards; define decision rights and escalation paths; charter and run the data governance council and working forums; and maintain the governance roadmap and maturity assessment against a recognized framework.
• Own enterprise data quality management. Define and maintain the critical data element inventory with business owners, establish measurable quality standards and thresholds, implement profiling, rules, and monitoring in partnership with data engineering, publish data quality scorecards, and drive root-cause analysis and remediation of defects to closure at the source rather than in downstream reports.
• Establish and maintain metadata, lineage, and the business glossary. Implement and administer the data catalog, define standard business terms and certified metric definitions, capture end-to-end lineage from source system field through the curated layer to reporting, and ensure data assets are discoverable, documented, and attributed to a named owner.
• Lead data privacy, classification, and regulatory data controls. Define and maintain data classification and handling standards for NPI and PII, partner with Information Security on access, masking, and entitlement design, own data retention and lifecycle requirements, and serve as the data governance point of contact for internal audit, SOC, investor, agency, and regulatory examinations, including evidence production and remediation tracking.
• Build and enable the stewardship network across the business. Recruit, train, and support business data stewards and data owners; define stewardship roles, responsibilities, and expectations; run onboarding and ongoing enablement; and drive adoption of governance standards through change management, communication, and measurable participation rather than mandate.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Position Requirements

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Business, Finance, Computer Science, or a related field required.
• Advanced degree or data governance certification such as CDMP or DGSP preferred.

Experience

• Minimum eight (8) years of experience in data management, data governance, data quality, or a closely related discipline.
• Minimum three (3) years leading a data governance or data quality program, including direct accountability for program outcomes.
• Minimum three (3) years of mortgage lending or financial services experience required, with working knowledge of the loan lifecycle and the data that supports it.
• Demonstrated experience standing up a governance program from an immature or fragmented starting point, not solely administering an established one.
• Experience defining critical data elements and implementing measurable data quality controls in production.
• Experience implementing and administering a data catalog or metadata management platform.
• Experience supporting regulatory examinations, internal audit, or investor and agency reviews, including evidence production and remediation tracking.
• Experience building and enabling a federated stewardship model across business units preferred.
• Experience working alongside a cloud data platform migration preferred.

Functional/Technical Skills

• Working knowledge of a recognized data management framework such as DAMA-DMBOK, and the judgment to apply it selectively rather than wholesale.
• Strong working knowledge of mortgage origination and servicing data, including loan, borrower, property, investor, escrow, and remittance data, and the reporting obligations attached to each.
• Knowledge of regulatory and investor reporting requirements applicable to mortgage lending, including HMDA, fair lending data, and agency and investor delivery requirements.
• Knowledge of consumer data privacy and protection regulation, including GLBA, CCPA/CPRA, and FCRA, and the controls and evidence required to demonstrate compliance.
• Practical SQL skill sufficient to profile data, validate quality findings, and challenge conclusions independently.
• Experience with data catalog, data quality, or metadata tooling, and familiarity with governance capabilities native to a cloud data platform such as Snowflake.
• Understanding of data classification, masking, tokenization, and role-based access design, sufficient to define requirements and evaluate implementation.
• Ability to write clear policies, standards, and procedures that people can follow without interpretation.
• Strong facilitation skills, including the ability to run a governance forum that produces decisions rather than discussion.
• Proven ability to influence business leaders and secure accountability without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present governance status, risk, and remediation to executive and audit audiences.

Environmental/Physical Demands

Work is typically performed in a standard office environment. The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sustain predictable work attendance, communicate with others, frequently required to stand, walk, sit, and use arms, hands and fingers to reach, handle or touch. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, and ability to adjust focus. Pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act, reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of all activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of an employee. The Company reserves the right to amend or modify this document at any time and without notice.

Benefits

Our benefits package includes 3 comprehensive Cigna or Kaiser medical plans, dental, and vision insurance. We provide short term and long-term disability insurance, basic life insurance, 401(k), and 11 employer paid holidays. In addition, we offer supplemental benefits to include life insurance, critical illness and accident plans.