Associate Director, Data Semantic Governance

AbbVie•Irvine, CA

4h•$141,500 - $268,500

About The Position

The Associate Director, Data Semantic Governance will shape the strategic direction for how business data is governed and leveraged across the organization, ensuring a trusted, scalable, and AI-ready enterprise foundation. This individual serves as the bridge between business stakeholders, data operations teams (for Commercial and APS), data strategy and BI teams, as well as our BTS (IT) partners. The candidate will own the governance standards and decision framework for AbbVie’s semantic and logical data landscape that ensures data is consistent, interoperable, compliant, and aligned to enterprise priorities. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in data governance, semantic architecture, metadata, master data management, and data quality, along with executive presence and the ability to influence and drive alignment across the organization.

Requirements

A bachelor’s degree or master’s degree in information systems, Business Analytics, Computer Science, or a related field is required.
7+ years of progressive experience in data governance, business data architecture, or data management, acting as the bridge between business strategy and IT execution.
Deep expertise with data governance and cataloging platforms (e.g., Alation, Collibra) and Master Data Management (MDM) platforms (e.g., Reltio, Informatica).
Advanced knowledge of conceptual and logical data modeling, business glossaries, data lineage, and semantic layer design.
Strong proficiency in SQL for data profiling, querying, and quality assessment.
Solid understanding of cloud data ecosystems (Snowflake, AWS, Azure) to effectively partner with and guide BTS engineering teams.
Proven ability to author enterprise data standards and drive adherence across diverse business units and analytics users.
Excellent communication and technical translation skills; able to distill complex architectural concepts into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in the Pharma/Life Sciences industry is highly preferred.

Responsibilities

Partner with Data Strategy, Analytics, and BTS (IT) teams to design a Semantic Governance process. Collaborate with BTS to define and approve semantic layer design, ontology mappings, standardize business glossary/terminology, canonical data models, metric definitions, dimensions and hierarchies, entity resolution and master data, data stewardship, metadata, data quality and lineage, search and discovery capabilities “Way of asking AI glossary”, access and governance rules, and consumption interfaces. Use usage patterns, feedback, and issue trends to improve semantic models.
Develop and implement standardized templates for AI agents to promote consistency, scalability, and ease of use. Establish and evolve enterprise data governance frameworks. Serve as the governance liaison between APEX business teams and BTS to align execution with commercial strategy, enterprise transformation goals, privacy & compliance, and AI enablement.
Define and operationalize business-driven data quality rules, anomaly detection, and monitoring protocols to strengthen trust in enterprise data. Partner with data stewards and IT teams to ensure data assets are cataloged, sensitivity-classified, and tagged with end-to-end lineage. Review data health score for completeness, consistency, accuracy, timeliness, and usability. Support quality scorecards, controls, and periodic governance reviews. Drive compliance-by-design across the enterprise data ecosystem and support proof-of-concepts for emerging semantic, metadata, and data governance technologies.
Influence senior stakeholders by clearly articulating how data governance and business architecture drive enterprise value. Represent the data governance function in executive forums, governance councils, and strategic working groups, while fostering cross-functional alignment around shared standards, stewardship expectations, and future-state data capabilities. Provide strategic oversight into initiatives, partners, and vendors supporting enterprise data governance priorities, and support investment decisions by connecting governance capabilities to enterprise outcomes and long-term value creation.