Associate Director, Data Governance, FAIR, and AI-Readiness

Amgen • Thousand Oaks, CA

1d

About The Position

Join Amgen’s Mission of Serving Patients
At Amgen, if you feel like you’re part of something bigger, it’s because you are. Our shared mission—to serve patients living with serious illnesses—drives all that we do.
Since 1980, we’ve helped pioneer the world of biotech in our fight against the world’s toughest diseases. With our focus on four therapeutic areas –Oncology, Inflammation, General Medicine, and Rare Disease– we reach millions of patients each year. Amgen is advancing a broad and deep pipeline of medicines to treat cancer, heart disease, inflammatory conditions, rare diseases, and obesity and obesity-related conditions. As a member of the Amgen team, you’ll help make a lasting impact on the lives of patients as we research, manufacture, and deliver innovative medicines to help people live longer, fuller happier lives.
Our award-winning culture is collaborative, innovative, and science based. If you have a passion for challenges and the opportunities that lay within them, you’ll thrive as part of the Amgen team. Join us and transform the lives of patients while transforming your career.
Associate Director, Data Governance, FAIR, and AI-Readiness
What you will do
Let’s do this. Let’s change the world. In this vital role you will advance Enterprise Data Governance, FAIR data practices, and a data product operating model that makes trusted, reusable, and responsibly accessible data available for analytics, automation, and AI innovation.
The successful candidate will lead cross-functional data strategy and delivery across data domains, translating scientific and business priorities into scalable governance, metadata, quality, semantic interoperability, and data product capabilities.

Requirements

• Doctorate degree and 2 years of Data Management, Information Systems, or related experience OR Master’s degree and 6 years of Data Management, Information Systems, or related experience OR Bachelor’s degree and 8 years of Data Management, Information Systems, or related experience OR Associate degree and 10 years of Data Management, Information Systems, or related experience
• Experience in the biotechnology or pharmaceutical industry, with an understanding of regulated data, business processes, and compliance requirements.
• Demonstrated leadership of enterprise data governance, data management, active metadata, data quality, or data product initiatives across business and technology teams.
• Hands-on understanding of FAIR data principles and their practical application through active metadata, standards, semantics, interoperability, and access controls.
• Experience establishing data governance operating models, including data ownership, stewardship, policy, standards, controls, and issue management.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills, with the ability to translate complex data topics into business value and decisions.

Nice To Haves

• Experience implementing enterprise data strategy, scaling FAIR, data products operating model, and data contracts.
• Knowledge of modern data management capabilities, including active metadata, data observability, lineage, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and policy-as-code.
• Experience with master data, data catalog, governance, quality, active metadata, and semantic technologies: Collibra, Databricks Unity Catalog, Reltio, SciBite, or TopQuadrant.
• Experience enabling responsible AI, including data readiness for machine learning, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI agent use cases.
• Ability to define measurable outcomes for data investments, including data product adoption, quality, time-to-discovery, reuse, compliance, and AI readiness.
• Experience managing external partners and geographically distributed delivery teams in complex stakeholder environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead the enterprise Data Governance, FAIR, and data product strategy and roadmap, aligning investments to scientific and business priorities.
• Establish a value-realization framework to measure business outcomes, adoption, and return on investment from data initiatives.
• Execute the Enterprise Data Strategy, including data ownership, reusable data products, lifecycle management, data contracts, and adoption measures.
• Evolve a federated governance operating model with clear decision rights, data ownership, stewardship accountabilities, data councils, data standards, and escalation paths.
• Evolve FAIR maturity across the enterprise, including embedding FAIR practices in the data lifecycle, metadata standards, persistent identifiers, controlled vocabularies, and access patterns.
• Advance active metadata, data catalog, lineage, business glossary, semantic and knowledge graph capabilities to improve discovery, context, interoperability, and trust.
• Set governance policies and controls for data quality, observability, privacy, security, retention, and responsible use; ensure fit-for-purpose data for regulated and AI-enabled use cases.
• Partner with Data Architecture, Data Engineering, Digital, Security, Privacy, Legal, and business teams to operationalize governed data products across platforms and domains.
• Enable responsible AI by defining and enforcing data readiness criteria.
• Serve as the data engagement lead for an assigned business function, driving adoption of data management practices, including FAIR, to deliver measurable data improvements and business value.
• Manage large-scale data programs, cross-functional initiatives, and external partners; communicate outcomes, risks, dependencies, and value realization to senior leadership.

Benefits

• A comprehensive employee benefits package, including a Retirement and Savings Plan with generous company contributions, group medical, dental and vision coverage, life and disability insurance, and flexible spending accounts
• A discretionary annual bonus program, or for field sales representatives, a sales-based incentive plan
• Stock-based long-term incentives
• Award-winning time-off plans
• Flexible work models where possible.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree