Master Data Management (MDM) Lead

Nelnet•Lincoln, NE

18h

About The Position

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology and education services to higher education institutions, K-12 schools, and individuals around the globe. The Master Data Management (MDM) Lead sits within Data Governance and owns the definition of customer, institution, and payment identity across NBS systems, including CRM platforms, enterprise payment and enrollment systems, and the Snowflake data platform. The role authors match rules, thresholds, and survivorship logic to determine authoritative records when systems disagree; owns the resulting canonical identifier architecture; and independently validates that production pipelines follow the approved standard. It remains independent of the teams that build and operate pipelines while working closely with data engineering, system owners, implementation partners, and business stakeholders on CRM migration and consolidation efforts. The role also establishes governance, stewardship, quality monitoring, and remediation practices, and provides consistent master data to analytics, reporting, and AI initiatives.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Data Analytics, Computer Science, Business, or a related field.
At least 5 years of experience in master data management, data quality, data engineering, or related data management roles.
Demonstrated experience authoring match rules, thresholds, and survivorship logic for one or more master data domains, such as customer, account, party, or product.
Experience designing identity resolution and golden record logic across multiple source systems.
Experience working with enterprise CRM data models, such as Creatio, Salesforce, HubSpot, or comparable platforms.
Experience with cloud data warehouse platforms such as Snowflake or comparable, including SQL proficiency sufficient for profiling, match testing, and validation.
Experience producing governance documentation that business owners, auditors, and external partners can use without further interpretation.

Nice To Haves

Professional certifications related to data management or master data management, such as DAMA CDMP or similar.
Experience supporting system migrations, consolidations, or platform implementations from a master data or data governance perspective.
Experience in a multi-brand or multi-entity organization where the same customer legitimately exists in more than one business unit's systems.
Experience with MDM tooling or match and merge engines, and data catalog platforms such as Atlan.
Experience overseeing external implementation vendors or contractors on data migration or identity resolution scope.

Responsibilities

Author, document, and maintain match rules, thresholds, and survivorship logic for golden records covering customer, institution, and payment identity across NBS systems.
Own the canonical identifier architecture, including canonical institution and customer IDs, and define where identifiers are assigned, stored, and enforced.
Establish formal entity resolution between business unit CRM records using documented, repeatable, business-approved match logic.
Define systems of record and ownership rules for master data attributes, and adjudicate conflicts when systems claim authority over the same entity or field.
Partner with data engineering to translate the match rulebook into production pipelines and independently validate pipeline output against approved standards.
Establish match quality thresholds and monitoring, review false positives and false negatives, and define manual stewardship workflows for unresolved records.
Direct remediation of duplicate, conflicting, and orphaned master records at production volume in coordination with the data quality program.
Embed master data requirements into system implementations, migrations, and integration design, including identifier-assignment sequencing before data loads.
Review vendor and implementation partner proposals for identity resolution, migration mapping, and data acceptance criteria, and confirm scope boundaries before contracting.
Maintain version control, change history, and business approvals for match and survivorship rules so values can be traced to source systems and governing rules.
Provide consistently keyed master data to downstream analytics, reporting, and AI initiatives, and advise on identity requirements for new use cases.
Facilitate master data decisions with business unit data product owners and stewardship forums, and escalate unresolved ownership disputes to the Director with recommendations.
Report master data coverage, match rates, duplicate volumes, and remediation progress to the Director and program stakeholders.