Job Description
We are seeking a technically skilled and detail-oriented Data Governance Specialist to join our Data Governance and Management team. This intermediate-level role plays a hands-on part in strengthening how Assent governs, secures, and manages data across platforms and domains.
The Data Governance Specialist will help define and enforce data governance policies, support access controls and data security protocols, and operationalize standards for metadata and data traceability.
The 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 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
- Support 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 monitor RBAC/ABAC; coordinate periodic access reviews, segregation of duties controls, and privileged access governance aligned with corporate security.
- Contribute to the authoring and maintenance of 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.
- Collaborate with the Metadata Management function to help define standards for metadata capture, ownership, glossary, and stewardship; align policies with catalog workflows without owning day to day operations.
- Assist in defining requirements and drive coverage for end to end data lineage with Engineering and Metadata Management to support audit, impact analysis, and change management.
- Track and report governance KPIs (e.g., policy compliance, access review completion, exception closure time) and publish dashboards for leadership.
- Support the evaluation and integration of governance tooling with our modern stack (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt) and leverage automation/GenAI for documentation and exception handling.
- Contribute recommendations to improve governance practices; ensure alignment with internal policies, privacy standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PII), and audit requirements
Qualifications
We strongly value your talent, energy and passion. It will also be valuable to Assent if you have the following qualifications:
- 5+ years of experience in data governance, data management, security, or a similar role.
- A degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field is typically required.
- Hands-on experience with policy as code and Open Policy Agent (OPA), including authoring and testing policies (e.g., Rego) and integrating them into CI/CD (required).
- Experience administering or implementing data governance/catalog tools such as Atlan or Collibra (required). Experience with Purview or Alation is an asset.
- Understanding of metadata and lineage concepts, access control models (RBAC/ABAC), and regulatory considerations (e.g., PII handling, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS).
- Proficiency in SQL, Git Hub, Python, SQL Server and experience with BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or Sigma.
- Experience with cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery) and data transformation tools (e.g., dbt).
- Exposure to GenAI tools and prompt based automation for governance documentation and workflows.
- Ability to build and interpret governance dashboards and communicate findings to both technical and non technical audiences.
- Strong problem solving skills, attention to detail, and stakeholder management.
- Familiarity with agile work environments and scrum ceremonies.
- Experience working with cross functional teams to resolve governance issues and align on standards.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
