Data Governance Specialist

Data Governance Specialist

Location: Chicago, IL

Role Summary

Own the day-to-day execution of our data governance program—policies, data quality, metadata/catalog, access controls, and lineage—so business teams can trust, find, and use data safely and compliantly.

Key Responsibilities

• Policy & Standards - Operationalize data policies (quality, access, privacy, retention) and maintain data standards, definitions, and classifications. Run governance forums; manage steward/owner RACI and exception intake.
• Metadata, Catalog & Glossary - Implement and curate business glossary terms, technical metadata, and dataset certifications in tools like Collibra/Alation/Purview/Atlan. Tag Critical Data Elements (CDEs) and link them to owners, lineage, and controls.
• Data Quality (DQ) & Issue Management - Define DQ rules (accuracy, completeness, timeliness, validity, uniqueness, consistency) and SLAs. Build monitoring with Great Expectations/Soda/Deequ; triage issues to stewards, track to closure, and report root-cause trends.
• Lineage & Impact Analysis - Capture end-to-end lineage (source→ETL/ELT→warehouse/lakehouse→BI) using native and OpenLineage/DataHub connectors. Use lineage for change impact, break analysis, and audit evidence.
• Access, Privacy & Security - Implement role/attribute-based access, masking, and segregation of duties in cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks/Unity Catalog, BigQuery, Redshift). Coordinate PII/PHI classification, retention, and deletion per policy; support DPIAs/ROPAs.
• Master/Reference Data - Support MDM/RDM processes (match/merge, survivorship, versioning) and govern change requests.
• Data Sharing & Contracts - Define data contracts with producers / consumers (schema, SLAs, quality thresholds, cadence) and enforce through CI/CD checks.
• Compliance & Audit - Map controls to regulations (e.g., SOX, GDPR/CCPA, HIPAA/PCI as applicable); prep artifacts and respond to audits.
• Enablement & Adoption - Train stewards and analysts; publish playbooks; drive catalog and certified-dataset adoption across business units.

Qualifications

Must-Have

• 7+ years in data governance, data quality, or data management roles.
• Hands-on with one or more: Collibra, Alation, Purview, Atlan, Informatica Axon/EDC, DataHub.
• Experience authoring DQ rules and automating monitors (Great Expectations/Soda/Deequ) and managing issue workflows.
• Practical knowledge of cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift) and BI (Power BI/Tableau/Looker).
• Familiarity with lineage tooling (native, OpenLineage/Marquez, DataHub) and RBAC/ABAC concepts.
• Strong stakeholder skills—facilitation, documentation, and change management.