Master Data Management (MDM) Lead

Nelnet Servicing•Lincoln, NE

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 world. The Master Data Management (MDM) Lead, within Data Governance, owns the definition of customer, institution, and payment identity across NBS systems, including CRM platforms, enterprise payment and enrollment systems, and Snowflake. This role defines match rules, thresholds, survivorship logic, and canonical identifier architecture, and independently validates that production pipelines implement approved standards. The role operates independently of the teams that build and run pipelines while working closely with data engineering, system owners, business stakeholders, and implementation partners on migration and consolidation efforts. The MDM Lead establishes authoritative identity and master data practices across systems, resolves data ownership questions, improves record quality, and ensures consistent, traceable master data is available for analytics, reporting, and AI use cases. The role also supports implementations and migrations, reviews partner proposals and scope, facilitates stewardship decisions, and reports progress and quality measures to the Director and program stakeholders.

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 platforms, including SQL proficiency 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 certification 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 customers may legitimately exist 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 defining golden records for 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 outputs against approved standards.
Establish match quality thresholds and monitoring, review false positives and false negatives, and define manual stewardship workflows for unresolved records.
Direct production-volume remediation of duplicate, conflicting, and orphaned master records in coordination with the data quality program.
Embed master data requirements into system implementations, migrations, and integration design, including sequencing requirements for identifier assignment before data loads.
Review vendor and implementation partner proposals covering identity resolution, migration mapping, and data acceptance criteria, and confirm scope boundaries before contracting.
Maintain version control, change history, and business approval records for match and survivorship rules, ensuring 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.