Senior Data Governance Specialist

Job Description

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.

Qualifications

We strongly value your talent, energy and passion. It will also be valuable to Assent if you have the following qualifications :

Additional Information

Life at Assent

Wellness : We believe that you and your family’s well being is important. As a result, we offer vacation time that increases with tenure, comprehensive benefits packages (details vary by country), life leave days and more.

Financial Benefits : It’s not all about the money – well, it’s a little about the money. We understand that financial health is important and we offer a competitive base salary, a corporate bonus program, retirement savings options and more.

Life at Assent : There is purpose beyond your work. We provide our team members with flexible work options, volunteer days and opportunities to get involved in corporate giving initiatives.

Lifelong Learning : At Assent, curiosity is not only valued but encouraged. You will receive professional development days that are available to you the day you start.

At Assent, we are committed to growing and sustaining an environment where our team members feel included, valued, and heard. Our diversity and equal opportunity practices are guided and championed by our Diversity and Inclusion Working Group and our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion includes recruiting and retaining team members from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and fostering a culture of belonging where all team members are included, treated with dignity and respect, promoted on their merits, and placed in positions to contribute to business success.

If you require assistance or accommodation throughout any part of the interview and selection process, please contact and we will be happy to help.