HR Data Governance and Privacy Lead
About The Position
The HR Data Architecture & Governance role sits within the Human Resources Information Systems function and is accountable for defining and governing the structure, standards, and usability of HR data. The role ensures people data is trusted, well-controlled, and suitable for downstream use across enterprise platforms, analytics environments, and regulatory use cases. The position provides leadership and accountability for HR data architecture, governance, and quality. It defines and maintains enterprise and canonical HR data models, clarifies data ownership and system designations, and establishes standardized structures and reference data. It also governs consumption-ready data, data contracts, derived data standards, privacy controls, and integration with enterprise data products. The role leads HR data governance and stewardship, maintains governance artifacts, oversees data quality controls and issue remediation, and provides senior HR leaders with visibility into risks. It also supports regulatory, audit, and risk requirements and serves as HR’s subject matter expert on people data structure, lineage, and usage. The role partners with HR, enterprise data and analytics, Risk, Compliance, and Privacy teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree required in Data Management, Information Systems, HR, Business, or a related field.
- 10 or more years of experience in data architecture, data governance, people data, or enterprise data management.
- Deep expertise in data architecture, data modeling, and data governance, with a focus on consumption-oriented design.
- Strong understanding of HR data domains within large, complex organizations.
- Demonstrated experience designing canonical data models and data standards for downstream consumption.
- Experience defining data contracts, lineage, quality controls, and governance processes.
- Experience working with enterprise data platforms and governance tooling such as Collibra or equivalent.
- Ability to translate HR concepts into clear, structured, and standardized data constructs.
- Strong influencing skills across HR, enterprise data, analytics, and control functions.
- Excellent communication skills, including explaining data structures and standards to senior non-technical stakeholders.
- High discretion and integrity in handling sensitive employee data.
Nice To Haves
- Advanced degree in Data Management, Information Systems, HR, Business, or a related field.
- Experience operating in regulated or highly controlled environments.
Responsibilities
- Define and maintain HR enterprise data architecture, including conceptual, logical, and business data models for core people data domains.
- Establish and govern canonical HR data models as the authoritative foundation for downstream consumption.
- Define system-of-record, system-of-maintenance, and system-of-consumption designations for HR data elements.
- Maintain standardized HR data structures, hierarchies, and reference data, including organizational structures, job families, cost centers, and location codes.
- Align HR data architecture with enterprise data models and cross-functional use cases involving Finance, Risk, Compliance, and enterprise analytics.
- Design and govern HR data for reliable downstream use across enterprise data platforms, analytics tools, planning systems, and regulatory processes.
- Define and maintain data contracts for HR data outputs, including structure, definitions, granularity, refresh frequency, permissible use, and data quality expectations.
- Establish standards for derived, calculated, and enriched HR data elements.
- Partner with enterprise data and analytics teams to integrate HR data into semantic layers, curated data sets, and enterprise data products.
- Embed privacy, confidentiality, data minimization, role-based access, and sensitivity classification into HR data structures.
- Escalate downstream consumption issues involving mismatched definitions, structural inconsistencies, or inappropriate use of HR data.
- Partner in and contribute to data migration activities.
- Lead HR data governance execution and ensure alignment with enterprise data governance standards and regulatory expectations.
- Define and oversee HR data ownership and stewardship models, including decision rights, issue management, and escalation paths.
- Align governance processes with enterprise CDO guidance, internal control frameworks, and industry best practices.
- Promote consistent use of approved HR data definitions and standards across consuming functions.
- Maintain HR data governance artifacts in the enterprise governance platform, including ownership, lineage, and usage context.
- Establish inventories of critical HR data elements and downstream data products.
- Define and monitor data quality controls and KPIs based on downstream dependency and business criticality.
- Prioritize, root-cause, and remediate data quality issues affecting downstream systems.
- Provide senior HR leadership visibility into data quality risks and downstream impacts.
- Ensure HR data architecture and governance practices support regulatory, audit, and risk requirements related to workforce data.
- Serve as HR’s subject matter expert on people data structure, lineage, and usage for regulatory inquiries and audits.
- Partner with Risk, Compliance, Privacy, and enterprise data teams to ensure downstream use of HR data is appropriate and controlled.
Benefits
- Competitive portfolio of benefits.
- May be eligible for an annual discretionary incentive award.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
