Director, Master Data
About The Position
The Director, Customer Master Data provides enterprise leadership, strategy, and accountability for customer master data across the organization. This role owns the definition, governance, quality, prioritization, and execution of customer master data that enables accurate order creation, digital access provisioning, billing integrity, reporting, and integrated platform experiences. As customer, system, and go-to-market complexity increases, customer master data is a critical operational and revenue-protecting control point. This role ensures trusted customer data across upstream and downstream systems, mitigates enterprise risk, and drives cross-functional alignment across Operations, TSG, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Customer Success and Product Management. This role will also be accountable to the Chief Data Officer’s data product framework and governance model.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in Master Data Management, Data Governance, or Enterprise Data Operations.
- Experience managing customer or user data supporting digital products, platforms, or SaaS solutions, including identity, access, and entitlement models.
- Proven leadership experience owning customer or account master data in complex, multi-system environments.
- Deep understanding of customer data concepts including accounts, organizations, contacts, hierarchies, identifiers, and lifecycle management.
- Experience partnering across Operations, IT, Finance, and Commercial teams.
- Demonstrated ability to operate both strategically and hands-on in dynamic environments.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with enterprise MDM platforms (e.g., Informatica MDM, SAP MDG).
- Background supporting order-to-cash, digital fulfillment, rostering, entitlement, or billing processes.
- Experience in education, SaaS, or subscription-based business models.
- Familiarity with large-scale system integrations and data transformation initiatives.
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the Customer Master Data strategy, roadmap, and operating model.
- Establish clear ownership for customer master entities, attributes, hierarchies, and identifiers across systems.
- Serve as the enterprise decision authority for customer master standards, policies, and resolution of data conflicts.
- Align customer master data priorities with go-to-market readiness, integrated HMH / NWEA execution, and platform transformation initiatives.
- Design and lead the Customer Master Data governance framework, including data ownership, stewardship, decision forums, and escalation paths.
- Define and enforce data quality metrics, SLAs, and controls.
- Ensure consistent application of match, merge, balance, and hierarchy logic across systems supporting customer identity and structure.
- Partner with Finance, Legal, and Compliance to ensure regulatory, billing, and audit requirements are met.
- Provide oversight and direction to customer account maintenance, stewardship, and data operations teams.
- Identify and mitigate single-points-of-failure, process gaps, and execution risk related to customer data.
- Reduce downstream rework, order fallout, billing errors, and access issues caused by poor data quality.
- Establish clear operational playbooks and standards for ongoing customer master data maintenance.
- Lead customer master data strategy and governance for digital product ecosystems, ensuring accurate data support for digital access, entitlement, provisioning, and user lifecycle management across platforms.
- Partner with IT and Enterprise Data teams on the design and evolution of MDM platforms and integrations (e.g., Informatica MDM, SAP, Salesforce, NetSuite, digital platforms).
- Ensure customer master data is consistently synchronized and consumable across upstream and downstream systems.
- Guide prioritization of enhancements, automation, and tooling to improve data quality, scale, and speed.
- Act as a senior partner to Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, Product Management, IT, and Analytics teams.
- Translate business requirements into scalable customer master data solutions.
- Communicate customer master data impacts, risks, and tradeoffs to executives and stakeholders.
- Represent Customer Master Data in enterprise planning, transformation, and operating forums.
- Lead and develop a high-performing team of customer data stewards, analysts, and data professionals.
- Define roles, responsibilities, and career paths for customer master data and stewardship functions.
- Foster a culture of accountability, data excellence, and continuous improvement.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
