Senior Data Governance Engineer

We are seeking a technically skilled and detail-oriented Senior Data Governance Specialist to join our Data Governance and Management team. This role is responsible for defining, enforcing, and operationalizing data governance policies; strengthening access controls and security; overseeing metadata standards in partnership with the metadata management function; and ensuring traceability and compliance across systems and domains. The Senior Data Governance Specialist will work closely with cross‑functional teams to ensure data is governed responsibly, securely, and in alignment with regulatory and audit requirements.

This is a key position for supporting organization‑wide data initiatives, ensuring that business decisions are powered by reliable, accurate, and trusted data, as we continue to build out our data governance and management function within the Product organization at Assent. The Senior Data Governance Specialist is a hands-on role that collaborates closely with partners across the engineering, security, legal/compliance, and product organizations, and serves to solve core governance challenges in our data ecosystem.

Key Requirements & Responsibilities 

• Own the development, enforcement, and lifecycle of data governance policies (access, classification, retention, exceptions) implemented as code with Open Policy Agent (OPA) and integrated into CI/CD.
• Implement and audit RBAC/ABAC; coordinate periodic access reviews, segregation‑of‑duties controls, and privileged access governance aligned with corporate security.
• Author and maintain data contracts (YAML/dbt) to enforce schema consistency, data ownership, and SLAs.
• Maintain a centralized policy register and SOPs for enforcement, exceptions, approvals, escalations, and reviews; provide enablement and training.
• Partner with the Metadata Management function to define standards for metadata capture, ownership, glossary, and stewardship; align policies with catalog workflows without owning day‑to‑day operations.
• Define requirements and drive coverage for end‑to‑end data lineage with Engineering and Metadata Management to support audit, impact analysis, and change management.
• Establish and report governance KPIs (e.g., policy compliance, access review completion, exception closure time) and publish dashboards for leadership.
• Evaluate and integrate governance tooling with our modern stack (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt) and leverage automation/GenAI for documentation and exception handling.
• Provide recommendations to improve governance practices; ensure alignment with internal policies, privacy standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PII), and audit requirements.
• Provide technical guidance and leadership to other team members.