Director, Data Governance & Observability

Job Description

Job Description

Company Description

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant’s sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

Job Description

Versant Media’s Data Platforms team is the central data store across the enterprise. We unify disparate systems into a secure, well-governed, real-time data environment that powers downstream products, analytics, and content delivery experiences.

We are seeking a Director, Data Governance & Observability to establish and operationalize data governance as a first-class platform capability. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can both design and implement governance mechanisms in code, while also setting standards, prioritizing work, and partnering across the organization.

This role will start as an individual contributor with leadership accountability , responsible for building the initial governance and observability foundations. Over time, the role is expected to grow into a people management position as scale and needs increase.

The Director, Data Governance & Observability reports to the VP of Data Platforms and works in close partnership with Platform Development, Data Products & Solutions, and SRE.

Responsibilities

Data Governance & Contracts

• Define and enforce data contracts across platform services and data products, including schemas, expectations, ownership, and change management
• Establish standards for data lineage, metadata, and semantic consistency

across the platform

• Own definitions for data quality (freshness, completeness, correctness) and how those standards are validated
• Partner with Platform Development to ensure governance requirements are embedded directly into pipelines, services, and APIs

Observability & Reliability (Data-Level)

• Define data-level SLIs and SLOs in partnership with the SRE organization
• Ensure contract violations, quality failures, and freshness issues are observable and actionable
• Build and maintain platform-facing health and operational dashboards related to data services
• Contribute to light executive-level reporting on platform health and data reliability (not business analytics)

Hands-On Platform Development

• Write production code to implement governance and observability mechanisms (e.g., schema validation, contract enforcement, lineage capture)
• Contribute to shared platform libraries, services, and tooling that make compliant behavior the default
• Review designs and code to ensure governance considerations are addressed early

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner closely with:
  • Director, Platform Development on schemas, contracts, and platform enforcement patterns
  • Director, Data Products & Solutions on base dashboards, self-service enablement, and consumer-facing trust signals
  • SRE on alerting strategy, incident classification, and reliability standards

• Help triage and prioritize governance-related intake and tradeoffs
• Clearly communicate standards and expectations to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders

Team Growth (Future)

• Hire and mentor data platform engineers focused on governance and quality as needs scale
• Gradually transition toward more people leadership and strategic ownership over time

Qualifications

• 10+ years Strong hands-on experience building production data or platform systems
• Deep understanding of data governance concepts, including contracts, lineage, metadata, and quality
• Experience defining and enforcing standards through code and automation, not just documentation
• Solid software engineering foundation, including:
  • API and schema design
  • Modular or service-oriented architectures
  • Automated testing and CI/CD practices
• Familiarity with observability concepts and working with SRE teams
• Comfortable operating with high ownership in a lean, fast-moving environment
• Strong collaborator who can work across platform, product, analytics, and operations teams

Nice to Have

• Experience working in large-scale enterprise or media environments
• Familiarity with lakehouse architectures and ELT pipelines
• Exposure to analytics or BI tooling (e.g., Tableau, Power BI) from a platform or enablement perspective
• Experience modernizing or governing legacy data systems in cloud-native environments

Additional Information

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to View email address on ziprecruiter.com.

VERSANT Media is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. We include a good faith pay range for each position to comply with applicable state and local pay transparency laws and to promote equity across our organization. Actual compensation will be based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, experience, and location and may include additional forms of compensation and benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, etc.

VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.