Director, Data Governance

Role Description

The Director, Data Governance, in the Global Analytics & Insights (GAI) organization, owns the governance function for Avalara’s enterprise data, metrics, and platforms - establishing the policies, controls, and practices that make GAI’s data trusted, secure, and fully compliant. This is a founding role for this function: you’ll take over the current processes, identify areas for improvement, gaps, and other opportunities, define a roadmap and scale into a full practice as the function matures. You’ll sit inside the GAI Data & Analytics Engineering organization and operate as a player-coach in the near term. You’ll be hands on with real governance work, tooling, and institutional muscle, partnering with Internal Audit and Information Technology to ensure the systems are complete and accurate. The first year mandate: get access controls right, ensure data classification and processes are aligned to Avalara’s enterprise standards, and establish the compliance posture that Avalara’s enterprise data requires.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data management, data engineering, analytics, or a closely related field; ideally in a SaaS or technology business at scale
• Demonstrated leadership experience, including leading teams, programs, and cross-functional initiatives; track record of building programs and teams from scratch a strong plus
• Deep expertise in data governance fundamentals — data access controls, classification, data quality management, lineage, and metadata management
• Experience working in or alongside finance organizations — financial reporting, analytics, or financial data processes — with a strong understanding of how financial data is produced, consumed, and governed
• Ability to read and review SQL code to assess whether the logic aligns with its documented business purpose — identifying definitional drift, undocumented transformations, or implementation that has diverged from stated intent
• Strong understanding of data security and privacy compliance requirements and how they translate to technical and operational controls
• Proven ability to drive adoption without formal authority — able to influence engineering teams, business stakeholders, and executive audiences simultaneously
• Experience building governance policies, data stewardship models, and process frameworks, not just inheriting them

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with Snowflake or an equivalent cloud data warehouse
• Familiarity with dbt or similar pipeline/transformation tooling — enough to partner effectively with Data Engineering, not to build pipelines directly
• Experience with data catalog or metadata management platforms (e.g., Alation, Collibra, DataHub, or similar)
• Experience with role-based access controls in cloud data environments, including conducting periodic access reviews, data sensitivity assessments, and compliance audits

Benefits

• In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.
• Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.
• Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture.
• Avalara has a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.