Director, Data Management & Governance

American Public Education, Inc. (APEI)

57d

About The Position

The Director, Data Management & Governance is a strategic, senior data and technology leader role within American Public Education, Inc’s. (APEI) enterprise Data & Analytics leadership team. This is a hands-on role to improve outcomes with data & analytics and drive additional value through more effective use of our enterprise data. You will be a consultative business partner to help achieve strategic organizational initiatives. You will own the strategy and execution of data management and governance organization wide in a modern, business value-oriented approach. This role is responsible for building and scaling metadata management efforts along with implementing and maintaining our enterprise data catalog. You also are responsible for master data management and reference data management. The role includes partnering closely with analytics teams, business stakeholders, and leading data stewardship as a community of practice, along with key data improvement initiatives. The data management strategy must support enabling self-service analytics, data accessibility, robust AI/ML, data privacy compliance, and data product development within the enterprise team and in partnership with franchise analytics teams. A partnering mindset is a must as data governance is in close partnership with data owners, Legal and Cyber teams, architecture and engineering, the data stewardship community, and technology delivery teams. The Director, Data Management & Governance is a new role and will eventually have direct reporting employees and/or contractors / contract teams. It also has matrixing to lead the data stewardship community throughout the business. This position reports directly to the AVP, Analytics & Data Insights.

Requirements

10+ years in data related roles
5+ years in data management/governance leadership
7+ years in overall data leadership experience
Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, Computer Science, or equivalent with Master’s in Data/Analytics related degree preferred
Expertise with data governance frameworks (DCAM, DAMA), automated policy enforcement, and modern approaches to governance that are more business value driven and partnership centric
Proven experience with cloud data platforms with Snowflake, Azure and Coalesce.io/DBT or similar ELT pipeline and orchestration tools highly preferred
Cloud data catalog and MDM program, delivery, platform, and operations experience
Expertise in SQL• Experience with streaming/event-driven architectures
Strong knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)
Knowledge of data quality frameworks, lineage tools, MDM tools, and observability platforms.
Solid planning, priority setting, product and project management skills with demonstrated experience managing multiple projects and cross functional teams concurrently
Strong experience with leading globally distributed remote teams including employees and contract delivery teams
Track record of delivering large-scale, mission-critical data management solutions with measurable business impact
Strategic thinking with ability to translate business goals into platform capabilities
Exceptional stakeholder management and influence across business and technology
Build talent: proven ability to attract, develop, motivate, and retain top data management talent
Strong experience modernizing and maturing organizational data management practices along with establishing a culture of continuous improvement
In-depth knowledge of architectural best practices, design patterns, governance and security principles
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to communicate and lead effectively with all levels of the organization from data engineers to C-Level executives

Nice To Haves

Product management experience preferred and data as a product experience highly preferred

Responsibilities

Define and execute the enterprise data management and governance strategy aligned to business objectives and overall data/analytics senior leadership vision and strategy.
Owns roadmap for strategic data management and governance.
Build and lead a high-performing organization wide data stewardship community of practice that is domain embedded and has clear data ownership.
Build and lead an efficient and effective enterprise data management team and function.
Lead master data management strategy, delivery, and operations that also includes key enterprise reference data management.
Lead building and scaling metadata management efforts along with implementing and maintaining our enterprise data catalog.
Lead Data Management & Governance to operationalize policies as code (RBAC, masking, row-level security, audit logging).
Designs and implements processes and systems for regulatory compliance (e.g. FERPA, GDPR, CCPA)
Establish platform governance for security compliance.
Drives design and implementation of scalable, resilient data pipelines for master data management workloads.
Ensure observability, lineage, and quality frameworks are embedded in pipelines and orchestration.
Lead cross functional efforts to improve data quality, focused around areas where data quality creates friction to a broader business initiative, driver, or efficiency outcome.
Foster a culture of automation, reliability, and continuous improvement while leveraging AI to improve data management efficiency and effectiveness.
Mentor the team and technical leads and develop succession plans.
Owns budgeting and forecasting for the MDM and data catalog platforms along with vendor and partner management.
Plans work and team capacity with the team, peer leaders, and data product owners/management.
Performs other duties as assigned.