Data Governance Specialist Role

OpenDataJobs • Washington, DC

3d

About The Position

Data Governance Specialists establish the decision rights, policies, standards, roles, and measures that help an organization manage data as a strategic asset. They turn broad expectations for quality, stewardship, access, lifecycle management, and accountability into operating practices that people can follow. The work is organizational as well as analytical. Specialists convene data owners and stewards, define issue-management and escalation paths, measure adoption and data quality, and maintain the governance operating model as mission needs change. They do not own every catalog record or recurring data operation; they set the framework through which those activities are accountable and measurable.

Requirements

• Experience designing or operating data-governance, stewardship, or data-management programs.
• Ability to define data standards, policies, decision rights, metrics, and issue-management processes.
• Working knowledge of data quality, metadata, inventories, lineage, and lifecycle concepts.
• Experience facilitating cross-functional governance forums and communicating with technical and business stakeholders.
• Ability to align governance practices with federal data strategy, organizational risk management, and applicable requirements.
• Comfort at the intersection of data, technology, risk, and mission.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with the Federal Data Strategy and agency responsibilities for inventories, metadata, standards, and data leadership (for federal roles).
• Experience with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF).

Responsibilities

• Establish decision rights, policies, standards, roles, and measures to manage data as a strategic asset.
• Convene data owners and stewards.
• Define issue-management and escalation paths.
• Measure adoption and data quality.
• Maintain the governance operating model as mission needs change.
• Set the framework for accountable and measurable data activities.
• Design data-governance charters, policies, standards, and decision-rights models.
• Develop stewardship structures, governance forums, issue-management workflows, and escalation paths.
• Create data-quality rules, metrics, exception processes, and improvement plans.
• Establish accountability models connecting data owners, managers, inventory leads, metadata specialists, and technical teams.
• Define governance processes for AI systems and data risk.
• Turn policy goals into practical operating models.
• Bring stakeholders together and make ownership visible.
• Use evidence to improve adoption.
• Explain why a standard matters, where it applies, and how teams can meet it.
• Define clear accountability, inventories, review processes, and monitoring for system and data risks, particularly for AI systems.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed