Associate Director, Data Semantic Governance

AbbVie; Mettawa (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

AbbVie is seeking an Associate Director for Data Semantic Governance to shape strategy, owning standards for semantic and logical data landscapes across the enterprise. You will partner with Data Strategy, Analytics, and BTS to define ontology mappings, data quality, and metadata governance, ensuring scalable, compliant data foundations for AI-ready initiatives.

You will influence senior stakeholders, drive adherence to enterprise standards, and lead governance initiatives with business units

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in information systems, analytics, CS, or related field.
• 7+ years in data governance, business data architecture, or data management.
• Deep expertise with governance/cataloging platforms (Alation, Collibra) and MDM (Reltio, Informatica).
• Advanced knowledge of data modeling, glossaries, data lineage, and semantic layer design.
• Strong SQL for profiling, querying, and quality assessment.
• Cloud data ecosystems knowledge (Snowflake, AWS, Azure) to guide engineering teams.
• Proven ability to author enterprise data standards and drive adherence.
• Pharma/Life Sciences experience is highly preferred.
• Excellent communication and ability to distill concepts for non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Shape strategic direction for semantic governance and enterprise data landscape.
• Define governance standards, ontology mappings, and data quality rules.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration with Data Strategy, Analytics, BTS, and IT partners.
• Influence executives and represent data governance in strategic forums.
• Drive initiatives linking governance capabilities to enterprise value.

Skills

Executive communication

Stakeholder influence

SQL proficiency

Data architecture translation

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in information systems / analytics / CS

Tools

Alation

Collibra

Reltio

Informatica

Snowflake

AWS

Azure

Job description

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas including immunology, oncology and neuroscience - and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.

Company Description

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas including immunology, oncology and neuroscience - and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.

Job Description

The Associate Director, Data Semantic Governance will shape the strategic direction for how business data is governed and leveraged across the organization, ensuring a trusted, scalable, and AI-ready enterprise foundation. This individual serves as the bridge between business stakeholders, data operations teams (for Commercial and APS), data strategy and BI teams, as well as our BTS (IT) partners. The candidate will own the governance standards and decision framework for AbbVie’s semantic and logical data landscape that ensures data is consistent, interoperable, compliant, and aligned to enterprise priorities. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in data governance, semantic architecture, metadata, master data management, and data quality, along with executive presence and the ability to influence and drive alignment across the organization.

Responsibilities

Strategic Alignment & Semantic Governance

Partner with Data Strategy, Analytics, and BTS (IT) teams to design a Semantic Governance process. Collaborate with BTS to define and approve semantic layer design, ontology mappings, standardize business glossary/terminology, canonical data models, metric definitions, dimensions and hierarchies, entity resolution and master data, data stewardship, metadata, data quality and lineage, search and discovery capabilities “Way of asking AI glossary”, access and governance rules, and consumption interfaces. Use usage patterns, feedback, and issue trends to improve semantic models.

Execution, Data Quality & Optimization

Define and operationalize business-driven data quality rules, anomaly detection, and monitoring protocols to strengthen trust in enterprise data. Partner with data stewards and IT teams to ensure data assets are cataloged, sensitivity-classified, and tagged with end-to-end lineage. Review data health score for completeness, consistency, accuracy, timeliness, and usability. Support quality scorecards, controls, and periodic governance reviews. Drive compliance-by-design across the enterprise data ecosystem and support proof-of-concepts for emerging semantic, metadata, and data governance technologies.

Enterprise Influence & Strategic Enablement

Influence senior stakeholders by clearly articulating how data governance and business architecture drive enterprise value. Represent the data governance function in executive forums, governance councils, and strategic working groups, while fostering cross-functional alignment around shared standards, stewardship expectations, and future-state data capabilities. Provide strategic oversight into initiatives, partners, and vendors supporting enterprise data governance priorities, and support investment decisions by connecting governance capabilities to enterprise outcomes and long-term value creation.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree or master’s degree in information systems, Business Analytics, Computer Science, or a related field is required.
• 7+ years of progressive experience in data governance, business data architecture, or data management, acting as the bridge between business strategy and IT execution.
• Deep expertise with data governance and cataloging platforms (e.g., Alation, Collibra) and Master Data Management (MDM) platforms (e.g., Reltio, Informatica).
• Advanced knowledge of conceptual and logical data modeling, business glossaries, data lineage, and semantic layer design.
• Strong proficiency in SQL for data profiling, querying, and quality assessment.
• Solid understanding of cloud data ecosystems (Snowflake, AWS, Azure) to effectively partner with and guide BTS engineering teams.
• Proven ability to author enterprise data standards and drive adherence across diverse business units and analytics users.
• Prior experience in the Pharma/Life Sciences industry is highly preferred.
• Excellent communication and technical translation skills; able to distill complex architectural concepts into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders.

Additional Information

Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law:

• The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location, and we may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future.
• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off (vacation, holidays, sick), medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.
• This job is eligible to participate in our long-term incentive programs.

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, incentive, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole and absolute discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole and absolute discretion, consistent with applicable law.

AbbVie is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to operating with integrity, driving innovation, transforming lives and serving our community. Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled.

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