Senior Manager, Data Governance

Justworks•New York, NY

1d•$166,000 - $214,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people. We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you. We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team. We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Manager, Data Governance to lead Justworks’ nascent Data Governance team. This is a player-coach role: you will manage a growing team of ICs while owning the programs, standards, and cross-functional relationships that make self-serve analytics at Justworks actually work. Your team’s mandate is to set and enforce the conditions under which analytics assets are defined, certified, documented, and trusted before they reach the business. This work is initiative-driven rather than request-response, and it requires someone who can prioritize without a defined ticket queue, build standards that engineers and analysts will adopt, and make the case for governance to stakeholders who may not have asked for it yet.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in a data role such as analytics engineering, data engineering, or data governance, with hands-on experience in SQL and dbt.
3+ years in people management, with a demonstrated track record of developing ICs and managing team delivery.
Experience owning data governance, data quality, or data standards programs — not just contributing to them.
Strong proficiency in SQL; working experience with dbt and dimensional modeling sufficient to define standards and review model conformance.
Demonstrated experience with managing data catalogs or data governance tooling (Atlan, Alation, Collibra, or similar).
Hands-on fluency with AI tooling as a productivity and automation lever; ability to apply it within the context of metadata management, documentation, and governance workflows.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to drive alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Strong program ownership mindset: comfortable prioritizing proactively, operating without a defined ticket queue, and driving initiatives that span teams and timelines.

Nice To Haves

Experience working in a startup or high-growth environment where programs had to be built from scratch is preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop the Data Governance team — currently two ICs (a Senior Analytics Engineer and a Data Governance Analyst), with further growth anticipated this year — through clear priorities, coaching, and recognition.
Own the foundational governance buildout: metadata standards and taxonomy, business domain framework, glossary migration and enrichment, data profiling governance, and model conformance for silver- and gold-layer assets.
Run the ongoing governance programs: asset certification and re-certification, data quality observability, glossary and metrics-catalog freshness, standards enforcement and audit, new asset intake and review, and stakeholder education and adoption.
Own the data catalog (Atlan) — ensuring the continued accuracy, completeness, and hygiene of asset metadata, glossary terms, and data products; and driving adoption of Atlan as the primary way stakeholders engage with certified data across Justworks.
Set and enforce certification standards: Governance holds the right to withhold or revoke certification on assets that fail to meet the standard. You’ll exercise that authority credibly and collaboratively.
Serve as a key subject matter expert for Data & Analytics and cross-functional stakeholders: arbitrate metric and definition differences, and drive company-wide adoption of best practices.
Drive an AI-native way of working and thinking: accelerate our data governance maturity by leveraging AI for unifying information, enriching metadata, automating governance work and more.
Contribute to the data governance strategy and roadmap in partnership with Data & Analytics leadership.