Senior Lead Data Governance Architect

Lumen Technologies•Remote, OR

1d•$132,232 - $195,940•Remote

About The Position

Lumen is seeking a strategic and technically adept Senior Lead Data Governance Architect to lead delivery of its data governance technology program. The role sits on Lumen's Telemetry, Observability & Technology team within the Office of the Chief Data Officer. That team does three things: Assesses new data tools and platforms before the organization adopts them. Develops platform governance standards with Data Engineering and the Data & Analytics Center of Excellence. Implements and manages the telemetry, observability, and enforcement tooling that measures and protects Lumen's data. As the senior individual contributor delivery lead, this person turns governance tooling strategy into concrete implementation plans and owns their execution. They also manage two Senior Data Governance Architects. The Principal Data Governance Architect sets the architectural guardrails, and this role builds the implementation engine within them. The ideal candidate combines hands-on depth in catalog, data quality, and access-control tooling with the leadership to deliver across a complex, multi-platform data estate.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.
8+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or governance tooling implementation, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead role.
Hands-on implementation experience with Informatica CDGC or a comparable enterprise catalog, meaning delivery and not only evaluation.
Experience implementing Databricks Unity Catalog, including catalog hierarchies, role-based access control, and data product registration.
Experience leading technical delivery for a small team of individual contributors in a complex, multi-platform environment.
Experience with data quality tooling (Validio, Great Expectations, Soda, or equivalent).
Proficiency in SQL and Python, with hands-on experience building automated workflows, scheduled pipelines, and data transformation scripts.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with identity and access management integration (SailPoint or equivalent).
Familiarity with Palantir Foundry and ontology-driven data modeling.
Microsoft Purview experience for governing unstructured content and Microsoft 365 data.
Experience with audit preparation and producing control evidence in regulated environments (CMMC, FedRAMP, or SOX).
Understanding of telecom product structures and service definitions.
Comfort working across the full governance technology stack, from platform configuration to executive-facing findings, without needing handoffs between teams.

Responsibilities

Lead the full implementation of the enterprise governance catalog (Informatica Cloud Data Governance & Catalog). This covers scanner configuration, taxonomy design, glossary seeding, and lineage mapping across legacy systems and modern platforms (for example, the enterprise data warehouse, Databricks, and Palantir Foundry), with consistency, auditability, and scalability as the goals.
Define the implementation patterns that the Senior Data Governance Architects apply to their platform clusters. Be their main point of technical escalation. Mentor and develop team members in governance engineering best practices.
Own the rollout of observability tooling (Validio, Informatica Cloud Data Access Management, or equivalent). This includes designing the data quality rule framework, setting monitoring thresholds, and configuring alerts.
Lead technical assessment work alongside the Director, Data Governance Technology. Build evaluation environments, run capability tests, and produce technical findings for new data tools and platforms.
Coordinate SailPoint integration design with the Information Security Office. Write the identity-to-governance mapping specifications that the Senior Lead Data Governance Engineer implements.
Act as primary delivery lead for the governance technology roadmap. The sequence runs Unity Catalog connectivity first, then catalog scanning and data characterization, then birthright identity and policy enforcement.
Design and build automated metadata ingestion, data quality rule deployment, and alert-driven workflows that cut manual processing and make governance tooling faster and more reliable. Use scripting (Python, SQL) alongside platform-native automation.
Work with Data Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, and Information Security so that governance tooling is built into platforms from the start rather than added later, and so that implementation is consistent across workspaces.