Director, Enterprise Data Governance

Alkermes

9h•$195,000 - $210,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Enterprise Data Governance is a new role responsible for continuing to establish and operationalize data governance capabilities that ensure trusted, high-quality, compliant, and accessible data across all functions. This role will lead a cross-functional Data Governance Committee and a network of Data Champions, partnering with a broad set of stakeholders, including R&D, Commercial, Operations, Legal, HR, IT, Information Security, Enterprise AI, and Program Management. This role will work a weekly hybrid schedule in our Waltham office. This role will report to the Executive Director, Enterprise Data Management.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred.
Extensive experience in data governance, metadata management, or enterprise data management within pharma/biotech.
7+ years of data governance related experience and 7+ years of pharma/biotech experience.
Experience supporting R&D and/or Commercial data domains.
Proven ability to lead cross-functional governance forums or stewardship programs.

Nice To Haves

Strong partnership and communication skills to engage stakeholders at different levels.
Ability to explain data governance concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong influencing, alignment-building, and problem-solving skills.
Ability to lead organizational change and drive adoption of data governance standards.
Excellent planning, facilitation, and documentation skills.

Responsibilities

Partner with the Data Governance Committee to understand key business needs and gain alignment on priorities.
Partner with Committee members and Data Champions to implement data governance solutions that address priorities and enhance existing data governance capabilities.
Lead continued development of enterprise data governance principles and frameworks, including policies, standards, stewardship models, and decision rights.
Assess the actionability of existing data governance principles; enhance value obtained from application of principles across functions.
Ensure data governance principles are in alignment with industry standards like FAIR and ALCOA+.
Define and maintain metadata standards, data inventories / catalogs, classification models, and data lineage.
Assess the utility of existing data inventories; increase ease of inventory maintenance; continue enhancing the value obtained from inventories.
Partner with Legal, IT, and Information Security to ensure compliance with data privacy and regulatory standards; support audits and regulatory reviews.
Partner with Legal, Quality and IT to ensure record retention policies are clear and actionable.
Partner with IT and Enterprise AI to embed data governance into data platforms, secure AI data pipelines, and AI/analytics workflows.
Drive alignment on master data domains, definitions, and standards across functions.
Promote a culture of data accountability, transparency, and quality across functions.
Support data‑related incident response activities (e.g., classification validation, lineage tracing, access review).
Define and track data‑quality, data‑risk, and governance adoption metrics.