Director, Data Governance

Avalara • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

10h • Remote

About The Position

The Director, Data Governance, in the Global Analytics & Insights (GAI) organization, owns the governance function for Avalara’s enterprise data, metrics, and platforms - establishing the policies, controls, and practices that make GAI’s data trusted, secure, and fully compliant. This is a founding role for this function: you’ll take over the current processes, identify areas for improvement, gaps, and other opportunities, define a roadmap and scale into a full practice as the function matures. You’ll sit inside the GAI Data & Analytics Engineering organization and operate as a player-coach in the near term. You’ll be hands on with real governance work, tooling, and institutional muscle, partnering with Internal Audit and Information Technology to ensure the systems are complete and accurate. The first year mandate: get access controls right, ensure data classification and processes are aligned to Avalara’s enterprise standards, and establish the compliance posture that Avalara’s enterprise data requires.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in data management, data engineering, analytics, or a closely related field; ideally in a SaaS or technology business at scale
• Demonstrated leadership experience, including leading teams, programs, and cross-functional initiatives; track record of building programs and teams from scratch a strong plus
• Deep expertise in data governance fundamentals — data access controls, classification, data quality management, lineage, and metadata management
• Experience working in or alongside finance organizations — financial reporting, analytics, or financial data processes — with a strong understanding of how financial data is produced, consumed, and governed
• Ability to read and review SQL code to assess whether the logic aligns with its documented business purpose — identifying definitional drift, undocumented transformations, or implementation that has diverged from stated intent
• Strong understanding of data security and privacy compliance requirements and how they translate to technical and operational controls
• Proven ability to drive adoption without formal authority — able to influence engineering teams, business stakeholders, and executive audiences simultaneously
• Experience building governance policies, data stewardship models, and process frameworks, not just inheriting them
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake or an equivalent cloud data warehouse
• Familiarity with dbt or similar pipeline/transformation tooling — enough to partner effectively with Data Engineering, not to build pipelines directly
• Experience with data catalog or metadata management platforms (e.g., Alation, Collibra, DataHub, or similar)
• Experience with role-based access controls in cloud data environments, including conducting periodic access reviews, data sensitivity assessments, and compliance audits
• You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here.
• You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers.
• You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.

Nice To Haves

• track record of building programs and teams from scratch a strong plus

Responsibilities

• Assess the current state of data governance processes, tooling, and practices within GAI — identify gaps, risks, and opportunities, and develop a prioritized roadmap to address them
• Own and evolve the Data Governance function within GAI — setting the operating model, quality bar, and strategic direction for how GAI's data assets are classified, accessed, and stewarded
• Review all processes, systems, and protocol for work related to critical data, partnering with engineering to ensure processes evolve to meet the highest standards
• Establish clear data ownership and stewardship assignments across GAI's key domains; define who is accountable and who is responsible for each data asset
• Operate as a player-coach in the near term — executing hands-on governance work while laying the foundation for a scaled team; recruit and develop governance talent as headcount grows
• Maintain and mature the existing role-based access governance model for GAI — including access controls, request/review processes, periodic access reviews, and data sensitivity audits across Snowflake and GAI's data platforms
• Lead the classification of GAI's data assets against Avalara's enterprise taxonomy (Public, Internal Use, Sensitive, Restricted); drive remediation of unclassified or misclassified data
• Partner with Legal, IT, and Privacy to ensure GAI's data handling practices comply with applicable regulatory and contractual requirements, including SOC 2
• Ensure our enterprise data is prepared for AI use- with the right security, classification, intent, and protection
• Build and maintain a data quality framework for GAI — quality dimensions, monitoring, alerting, and remediation processes; apply particular rigor to financial metrics and reporting data given their sensitivity and downstream impact
• Review SQL models and pipeline logic to verify that implementation aligns with documented business purpose — identifying definitional drift, undocumented transformations, or logic that has diverged from stated intent
• Champion development of a data catalog and metadata management capability within GAI; ensure pipelines, models, and data products are discoverable, documented, and trusted
• Establish data lineage practices that provide visibility into how data flows through GAI systems and where it is consumed downstream
• Serve as GAI's primary liaison to Avalara's enterprise governance, security, privacy, and AI CoE teams — ensuring GAI practices align with company-wide frameworks
• Partner with Internal Audit and Information Technology on compliance reviews, control assessments, and system-level accuracy — ensuring GAI's data systems meet enterprise audit standards
• Engage executives and cross-functional leaders on data risk, compliance posture, and governance maturity; influence adoption without formal authority over partner functions
• Partner with Data Engineering and Analytics Engineering to ensure governance requirements are built into pipelines and semantic models, not bolted on afterward

Benefits

• In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.
• Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.
• Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture. We also have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.

What This Job Offers

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