Data Governance and Standards Lead

U.S. Bank • Chicago, IL

1d • $139,230 - $163,800 • Hybrid

About The Position

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Governance & Standards Lead to join the Governance & Architecture team within the Enterprise Data Office. This is a hands-on leadership role, critical to advancing the modernization of enterprise data governance and enablement capabilities by guiding, assessing, and executing data governance accelerators, applying architecture and data management standards and enablement frameworks for catalog, lineage, data quality, and access management aligned with the Enterprise Data Governance, Security, Privacy, Technology, Risk, & Enterprise Architecture teams. The role focuses on accelerating domain, product, and platform governance improving speed and consistency in data delivery, reducing risk, and ensuring regulatory compliance to enable trust and transparency in data.
About the EDO Governance & Architecture Team
We are the data governance and architecture standards body for the Enterprise Data Office, focused on data and AI governance for domain, product, and platform to build trust and improve speed of data product delivery.
Vision | Make data products and AI solutions accurate, secure, safe, and compliant.
Mission | Deliver modern governance and architecture accelerators to speed up adoption and execution.
Values | In addition to U.S. Bank core values, we prioritize:
Head high: We build with excellence. Our work is intentional, high‑quality, and designed to last, so we are always proud of what we deliver and comfortable standing behind it.
Accountability Over Activity: We take end‑to‑end accountability, from problem framing through delivery, adoption, and outcomes.
Strategic Intelligence: We think in systems, anticipate downstream impact, and collaborate to win as a pod, not as individuals.
Relentless Craft: We are passionate about the work we do. Our drive comes from curiosity, purpose, and a genuine love of building impactful solutions.
About the Role
The Senior Governance & Standards Lead is a senior contributor and leadership role; responsibilities include accelerating data governance adoption through implementation and application of modern technology stack capabilities. Develops data model standards, data movement, storage, and consumption architecture skills libraries, and ensures that domain and product team needs are met to comply with governance requirements. This role sits at the intersection of product enablement, technical strategy, and execution, acting as a key governance resource for delivery teams across the Enterprise Data Office and broader bank.
Unlike a traditional data governance role, this position focuses less on day-to-day catalog, lineage and data quality implementations and more on defining standards and creating reusable accelerators to improve sourcing, ingestion, and consumption patterns, and operating guidance that materially improve time to value, consistency, and quality of data products.
The ideal candidate brings deep technical credibility, strong product thinking, and the ability to influence across teams without formal authority. This role is focused on reducing fragmentation, improving developer and analyst productivity, and ensuring that modern data governance capabilities are adopted safely and effectively at scale.
Key Activities
Lead the design and evolution of reusable data governance accelerators and ensure regulatory and compliance requirements are met across data, product, and platform.
Implement and provide deep expertise in governance capabilities (e.g., Unity, Horizon, and Data Intelligence Platform) in platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Collibra and Power Platform.
Serve as a data governance advisor to product delivery teams aligned with enterprise teams.
Translate governance capabilities into clear pathways, playbooks, and compliance guidance for teams.
Apply product thinking to data and governance capabilities, ensuring solutions are designed for quality, usability, adoption, and measurable impact.
Define success metrics for governance accelerators and enablement efforts, tracking compliance and productivity gains.
Work closely with data engineers, analytics engineers, architects, data product owners, and product partners to align solutions with enterprise data strategy.
Act as a connector across teams, ensuring consistency while respecting domain-specific governance needs.
Influence engineering and architecture standards through credibility, hands-on expertise, and demonstrated results.
Continuously improve by evaluating, testing, and experimenting with emerging data and AI tools, platforms, and services.
Document governance outcomes, change management plans, adoption guides, and data usage analysis to support governance metrics.
This role requires effective project management, communication and collaboration skills, along with the ability to work effectively with stakeholders across data, technology, and product owner teams. The successful candidate will bring deep technical fluency across modern data platforms and cloud capabilities and will contribute to advancing the Enterprise Data Strategy through hands‑on engineering, technical leadership, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience
• Seven or more years of experience in data governance strategy, planning, and policy
• Deep understanding of financial institution/Banking concepts.
• Knowledge of banking regulation and requirements for regulatory reporting.
• Strong understanding of modern data engineering and governance concepts, including batch and streaming data processing, data modeling, and data product design.
• Demonstrated expertise in enterprise data ecosystems and shared platform models.
• Ability to assess tradeoffs across tools, architectures, and implementation approaches.
• Strong hands-on analytical and problem-solving skills with a focus on root-cause analysis and optimization.
• Operates as a leader without relying on formal authority.
• Proficient working across ambiguity and shaping problems before solving them.
• Strong communicator who can engage both technical teams and senior stakeholders.
• Strong command of data governance and workflow management tools.
• Strong hands-on experience with modern data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks, with the ability to translate technical capabilities into reusable patterns.
• Proficiency in SQL with sufficient depth to prototype, validate, and guide implementation approaches.
• Deep understanding of data quality, lineage, observability, security, and governance concepts as they impact product adoption.
• Hands-on experience with AI enablement, orchestration, context and semantic management including how data governance accelerators support product outputs.

Nice To Haves

• Demonstrated experience influencing adoption of shared platforms, tools, or standards in a large enterprise environment.
• Strong analytical, organizational, problem-solving, and project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple initiatives concurrently.
• Hands-on experience with programming languages such as Python and SQL.
• Expertise in visual analytics tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or equivalent platforms.
• Experience with Power Platform tools such as Power Automate and Power Apps
• Proven track record in automating and optimizing ETL processes at scale.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for documenting technical processes and engaging with cross-functional teams and presenting to senior management.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of reusable data governance accelerators and ensure regulatory and compliance requirements are met across data, product, and platform.
• Implement and provide deep expertise in governance capabilities (e.g., Unity, Horizon, and Data Intelligence Platform) in platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Collibra and Power Platform.
• Serve as a data governance advisor to product delivery teams aligned with enterprise teams.
• Translate governance capabilities into clear pathways, playbooks, and compliance guidance for teams.
• Apply product thinking to data and governance capabilities, ensuring solutions are designed for quality, usability, adoption, and measurable impact.
• Define success metrics for governance accelerators and enablement efforts, tracking compliance and productivity gains.
• Work closely with data engineers, analytics engineers, architects, data product owners, and product partners to align solutions with enterprise data strategy.
• Act as a connector across teams, ensuring consistency while respecting domain-specific governance needs.
• Influence engineering and architecture standards through credibility, hands-on expertise, and demonstrated results.
• Continuously improve by evaluating, testing, and experimenting with emerging data and AI tools, platforms, and services.
• Document governance outcomes, change management plans, adoption guides, and data usage analysis to support governance metrics.

Benefits

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)
• Basic term and optional term life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability
• Pregnancy disability and parental leave
• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan
• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)
• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities
• Adoption assistance
• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior