Data Governance Leader

About Ascendion Ascendion is a leading provider of AI-Native software engineering services. Our applied AI, software engineering, cloud, data, experience design, and talent transformation capabilities accelerate innovation for Global 2000 clients. Ascendion is headquartered in New Jersey. In addition to our remote/hybrid workforce, we have a presence in 12 countries and 40+ global offices across North America, Europse, and APAC. We are committed to building technology powered by Generative AI with an inclusive workforce, service to our communities, and a vibrant culture. For more information, please go to www.ascendion.com. (https://www.ascendion.com./)
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Experience: 10-15 years overall, including 7+ years designing and implementing enterprise data governance and data management capabilities
Role Summary Lead data governance and data management initiatives from maturity assessment and operating-model design through implementation and ongoing governance operations. The role requires strong governance knowledge and technical capability across metadata, cataloguing, lineage, data quality, access controls, data products and modern data platforms. The individual will define practical standards and work with data owners, stewards, architects, engineers and BI teams to embed controls into delivery processes and technical assets.
Key Responsibilities   Assess governance maturity across ownership, stewardship, policies, metadata, glossary, lineage, quality, classification, privacy, security, retention and lifecycle management.   Define centralized, federated or hybrid governance operating models, including forums, roles, RACI, decision rights, escalation paths and measurable accountability.   Establish business glossary, data catalog, metadata standards, critical data elements, classification and certification requirements. Define data-quality practices covering profiling, rules, thresholds, monitoring, issue management, root-cause analysis, remediation and scorecards. Partner with engineering teams to embed validation, reconciliation, quarantine, exception handling and observability controls. Define end-to-end lineage and impact-analysis requirements across sources, pipelines, curated data, semantic models, metrics and reports. Design governance requirements for data products, including ownership, service expectations, quality, refresh, sensitivity, access, lineage and lifecycle. Define Unity Catalog standards for catalog and schema organization, ownership, privileges, tags, row filters, column masks, auditing and data sharing. Configure or guide Microsoft Purview, Collibra, Alation, Informatica, Atlan or similar governance platforms. Establish governance controls for Power BI semantic models, shared datasets, metrics, certification, RLS/OLS, workspaces and self-service analytics. Define onboarding, change, certification, publication, escalation, access review, archival and deprecation workflows. Lead governance rollout, owner and steward onboarding, training, adoption measurement, decision tracking and continuous improvement.
Must-Have Skills Hands-on enterprise data governance and data-management implementation. Metadata management, business glossary, data catalog, lineage and impact analysis. Data-quality profiling, SQL-based validation, rule management, monitoring, scorecards and remediation. Data ownership, stewardship, operating models, decision rights, RACI and federated governance. Databricks Unity Catalog concepts, including privileges, lineage, classification, masking, auditing and sharing. Experience with Microsoft Purview, Collibra, Alation, Informatica, Atlan or a comparable platform. Understanding of lake house, data warehouse, data modelling, data products, Power BI and data-engineering delivery. Privacy, security, classification, retention and lifecycle controls.
Good-to-Have Skills DAMA/CDMP, DCAM, Databricks or Microsoft Purview certification. Master and reference data management experience. Manufacturing, supply chain or regulated-data experience. Experience integrating governance into Agile delivery, CI/CD, migration and production support.
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