Dir, Data Governance & Observability

Versant•New York, NY

14d•$190,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Versant Media’s Data Platforms team is the central data store across the enterprise. We unify disparate systems into a secure, well-governed, real-time data environment that powers downstream products, analytics, and content delivery experiences. We are seeking a Director, Data Governance & Observability to establish and operationalize data governance as a first-class platform capability. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can both design and implement governance mechanisms in code, while also setting standards, prioritizing work, and partnering across the organization. This role will start as an individual contributor with leadership accountability, responsible for building the initial governance and observability foundations. Over time, the role is expected to grow into a people management position as scale and needs increase. The Director, Data Governance & Observability reports to the VP of Data Platforms and works in close partnership with Platform Development, Data Products & Solutions, and SRE.

Requirements

10+ years Strong hands-on experience building production data or platform systems
Deep understanding of data governance concepts, including contracts, lineage, metadata, and quality
Experience defining and enforcing standards through code and automation, not just documentation
Solid software engineering foundation, including: API and schema design
Solid software engineering foundation, including: Modular or service-oriented architectures
Solid software engineering foundation, including: Automated testing and CI/CD practices
Familiarity with observability concepts and working with SRE teams
Comfortable operating with high ownership in a lean, fast-moving environment
Strong collaborator who can work across platform, product, analytics, and operations teams

Nice To Haves

Experience working in large-scale enterprise or media environments
Familiarity with lakehouse architectures and ELT pipelines
Exposure to analytics or BI tooling (e.g., Tableau, Power BI) from a platform or enablement perspective
Experience modernizing or governing legacy data systems in cloud-native environments

Responsibilities

Define and enforce data contracts across platform services and data products, including schemas, expectations, ownership, and change management
Establish standards for data lineage, metadata, and semantic consistency across the platform
Own definitions for data quality (freshness, completeness, correctness) and how those standards are validated
Partner with Platform Development to ensure governance requirements are embedded directly into pipelines, services, and APIs
Define data-level SLIs and SLOs in partnership with the SRE organization
Ensure contract violations, quality failures, and freshness issues are observable and actionable
Build and maintain platform-facing health and operational dashboards related to data services
Contribute to light executive-level reporting on platform health and data reliability (not business analytics)
Write production code to implement governance and observability mechanisms (e.g., schema validation, contract enforcement, lineage capture)
Contribute to shared platform libraries, services, and tooling that make compliant behavior the default
Review designs and code to ensure governance considerations are addressed early
Partner closely with: Director, Platform Development on schemas, contracts, and platform enforcement patterns
Partner closely with: Director, Data Products & Solutions on base dashboards, self-service enablement, and consumer-facing trust signals
Partner closely with: SRE on alerting strategy, incident classification, and reliability standards
Help triage and prioritize governance-related intake and tradeoffs
Clearly communicate standards and expectations to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders
Hire and mentor data platform engineers focused on governance and quality as needs scale
Gradually transition toward more people leadership and strategic ownership over time