Senior Data Steward (Real Estate Property Data)

Cotality • San Diego, CA

3d • Remote

About The Position

At Cotality, we are driven by a single mission—to make the property industry faster, smarter, and more people-centric. Cotality is the trusted source for property intelligence, with unmatched precision, depth, breadth, and insights across the entire ecosystem. Our talented team of 5,000 employees globally uses our network, scale, connectivity and technology to drive the largest asset class in the world. Join us as we work toward our vision of fueling a thriving global property ecosystem and a more resilient society. Cotality is committed to cultivating a diverse and inclusive work culture that inspires innovation and bold thinking; it's a place where you can collaborate, feel valued, develop skills and directly impact the real estate economy. We know our people are our greatest asset. At Cotality, you can be yourself, lift people up and make an impact. By putting clients first and continuously innovating, we're working together to set the pace for unlocking new possibilities that better serve the property industry. Job Description: Unlocking Value and Governing Cotality's Data Assets The Property Data Steward is the Data Fluency Leader and Value Enabler for Cotality's core property data assets (Tax Assessor, Appraisal, Transactions, and Derived Data). This is a strategic, high-impact role responsible for moving Data Stewardship beyond basic curation into AI Enablement and Enterprise Confidence. As a dual role, you are the highest-level expert in data fluency across the property domain and the data supply chain. You act as the primary Business/Technology Liaison , responsible for ensuring all products, models, and decisions built on Cotality’s data have a strong foundation of data that is fit-for-use and has consistent interpretation. Your core mandate is to fundamentally unlock the strategic use of our data assets for the business by enforcing governance principles and enabling effective data consumption. You will champion the "why" behind governance, providing the essential scaffolding and framing the organization relies on, ensuring that data is Findable, Usable, Well Understood, and Trustworthy. Your success will be measured by delivering AI-Ready Data and championing AI-Enabled Data Stewardship.

Requirements

• Business Acumen & Domain Mastery: Intimate knowledge of property data domains (Assessor, Appraisal, Transactions) and the specific business use cases within the financial, insurance, or real estate sectors. 5-7 years of relevant experience.
• Data Governance & Analytical Practice: Proven experience in supporting data governance standards, policies, and operating models. Proficiency with Enterprise Data Governance platforms (e.g., Collibra) and metadata management.
• Critical Thinking & Negotiation: Exceptional communication, presentation, and negotiation skills. Ability to critically think about a problem and provide solutions that meet stakeholders' needs. Must act as an effective Arbiter and Liaison between technical teams, business leaders, and compliance stakeholders. Systemic thinking and the ability to translate technical output into clear business impact are essential.
• Bachelor's Degree preferred or equivalent work experience

Nice To Haves

• AI Aptitude and Technical Literacy: Demonstrated hands-on experience as a core user of AI tools (e.g., LLMs, generative AI, advanced analytics) for personal productivity and process optimization. Strong understanding of AI/ML basics.
• Data Ontology and Taxonomy: Background in developing and implementing data ontologies for use in semantic layers.

Responsibilities

• Data Governance Interpretation and Advocacy
• Standard Advocacy & Policy Enablement: Support the creation and maintenance of the Data Stewardship Standard Handbook , which rolls up to the overall Data Governance Policy. Your focus will be on operationalizing the spirit of the rule to accelerate business value, not on process constraints.
• Data Classification and Metadata Stewardship: Responsible for Metadata management and Classification of all core data fields in the property domains. You will champion and contribute to this process to ensure data assets are Findable, Usable, Understandable, and Trustworthy in alignment with Cotality's enterprise goals.
• Compliance and Permissible Use: Partner with data governance, data sourcing, and compliance to ensure appropriate permissible use standards are tagged and enforced.
• Center of Excellence (CoE) Leadership: Drive the adoption of stewardship principles through the CoE, acting as the subject matter expert to democratize governance functions across non-FTE roles in Product, Operations, and Data Science.
• Strategic Data Asset Readiness & Fit-for-Use: Champion the fitness-for-purpose of data assets for all business use cases, from critical production products to future exploratory needs. This includes: Partnering with Data Quality and Engineering teams to define and continually refine quality metrics and scorecards based on domain knowledge. Proactively driving action plans for data improvement based on quality scores, assessing urgency (e.g., KBE status), and recommending whether to adjust governance rules or the data itself. Strategically cataloging and classifying all data (including unused or exploratory data) based on its current and potential use in Cotality's products (e.g., Critical, Informative, Exploratory) to accelerate time-to-value.
• Data Feasibility and Product Advisory: Conduct in-depth analysis and research to advise Product, Data Science, and Engineering teams on the Fitness-for-Use of data assets. Specifically, you will recommend fields based on quality, fill rate, lineage, and other metadata to support critical use cases.
• Define and Govern Ontology (The Keeper of the Dictionary): Partner with key stakeholders to define the unifying language and global ontology for core property data concepts to ensure consistent semantic interpretation across all business units, data supply chains and consuming systems. You will act as the ontological arbiter.
• AI Readiness and Semantic Interpretation: Collaborate with key stakeholders to design the Clarification Layer within the semantic framework. This layer enables CoreAI and ML models to intelligently interrogate and interpret diverse data definitions, ensuring data is AI-Ready.
• Operational AI Advocacy: Identify and advise on opportunities where AI and ML operations can be leveraged to enhance the internal data supply chain, improve data quality monitoring, and increase governance efficiency.
• Governance Platform Super User: Act as the primary feedback loop for the Data Governance Tool (e.g., Collibra). Define and mandate feature requirements to eliminate manual cataloging and curation tasks.
• Embedding Governance: Partner with Data Engineering and Technical Stewards to embed governance into the "native run of show" (e.g., championing Requirements as Code) to ensure automated data profiling, lineage capture, and cataloging of data assets in alignment with Enterprise Data Stewardship standards.

Benefits

• Time off: Generous PTO and 11 paid holidays, plus well-being and volunteer time off.
• Family Support: Up to 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave and a baby stipend.
• Health: Multiple medical plan options with mental health and wellness support offerings.
• Retirement: 401(k) with company match and vesting after one year.
• Financial Perks: $400 annual well-being stipend and tuition assistance up to $5,250.
• Extras: Recognition Rewards, Referral bonuses, exclusive discounts and more!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level