Director, Data and AI Governance

Natera

1h • Remote

About The Position

As the Director of Data & AI Governance, you will establish and lead enterprise-wide data management programs that ensure safe, compliant, high-quality data and AI. You will oversee Data Governance, AI Governance, and Data + AI Stewardship, serving as the central authority on policies, forums, and controls across R&D, Lab Operations, Commercial, and SG&A domains. You will lead the Data & AI Governance Council through advocacy and a well thought data management strategy.
This role goes beyond policies into technical governance — it requires experience of how to build frameworks, deploy controls in code, and integrate governance into engineering delivery. The role spans all dimensions of governance, including: quality, privacy, security, agentic automation, AI risk management, bias/fairness testing, evals, and vendor AI evaluation.

Requirements

• 15+ years in Data or AI governance with at least 7+ in leadership roles.
• Excellent stakeholder management and executive communication skills.
• Proven track record of building and leading enterprise-wide governance programs, councils, and stewardship networks that span both data governance (catalogs, lineage, quality) and AI/ML governance (model risk, bias/fairness, explainability, monitoring).
• Deep understanding of healthcare regulatory frameworks impacting AI: HIPAA, CLIA, FDA, GDPR, and regulations (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, Japan AI Promotion Act).
• Experience with LLM/GenAI governance implementation as per common regulatory frameworks: prompt logging, bias testing, guardrails, explainability.
• Experience in vendor AI/ML evaluation and governance, including due diligence of third-party AI/ML tools and platforms.

Nice To Haves

• Certifications in data governance, privacy, or risk management (DAMA CDMP, CIPP, CRISC)
• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Computer Science, AI/ML, engineering or related field.
• Experience driving AI change management and building a culture of responsible AI adoption (training, awareness, champion networks).
• Proven experience embedding governance in code (pipelines, registries, CI/CD).

Responsibilities

• Define enterprise data management strategy and operating model and ensure that it is executed consistently across the enterprise.
• Chair and operationalize the AI & Data Governance Council, driving decision-making and accountability across legal, regulatory, compliance, IT, security, engineering, and product.
• Lead a federated stewardship model, ensuring business units own data while governance enforces consistency and compliance.
• Establish governance forums (steering committees, working groups, architecture boards) with clear outcomes.
• Build and drive adoption of 360° master/reference datasets (e.g., Case360, Patient 360, Provider 360, Billing 360) and ensure they are maintained as sources of truth for analytics and AI
• Partner with engineering teams to build interoperable standards that can be used to connect domain datasets to create longitudinal data products
• Define and enforce enterprise data governance policies, ensuring consistency in data definitions, lineage, and stewardship across all domains
• Build and manage enterprise data catalogs and metadata services to make data discoverable, trustworthy, and reusable across the organization.
• Establish and operate data quality frameworks with validation rules, anomaly detection, and automated testing to ensure accuracy, completeness, and timeliness.
• Embed data quality checks and lineage tracking directly into data and AI pipelines so that governance guardrails can be adopted without friction.
• Develop AI use case risk management framework (RMF) to evaluate AI use cases from a governance, regulatory, medical, privacy, security, and risk standpoint
• Build and maintain an AI risk register and incident response plan for all AI use cases
• Develop governance policies (privacy, security, quality, fairness, integrity) aligned to HIPAA, CLIA, FDA, GDPR, and emerging AI regulations.
• Translate policies into technical implementations by embedding controls into: ETL pipelines, feature stores, and model registries CI/CD workflows for ML/GenAI models Prompt orchestration and output logging for LLMs Bias/fairness testing, drift detection, explainability dashboards
• Build and execute agentic automation processes and associated guardrails to enable business process automation
• Build documentation and process to ensure agent accountability through change history, audit logs, versioning etc.
• Track external regulatory trends and industry standards (e.g., NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act, FDA AI/ML guidance)
• Lead AI change management initiatives, including training programs, awareness campaigns, and a network of governance champions to drive adoption of best practices.
• Partner with Corporate Communications to cascade governance updates, AI guardrails, and usage guidelines across all levels of the organization.
• Develop and enforce vendor and third-party AI evaluation frameworks, assessing external AI tools for governance, data security, model risk, and compliance posture before integration.
• Track and manage vendor AI risks through standardized assessments, approvals, and monitoring processes.

Benefits

• Employee benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans for eligible employees and their dependents.
• Additionally, Natera employees and their immediate families receive free testing in addition to fertility care benefits.
• Other benefits include pregnancy and baby bonding leave, 401k benefits, commuter benefits and much more.
• We also offer a generous employee referral program!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees