Data Governance Lead — Remote

Alpaca; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Benefits

Stock Options

Home-Office Setup

Brex Card Stipend

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking an experienced Lead, Data Governance to shape and run our governance and security program across a global lakehouse, analytics tools, and internal data products. You will define classifications, access controls, and data protection standards in collaboration with Data Engineering and Data Science.

With a fast-growing environment spanning US, Japan, EU and beyond, you will lead data quality, inventory, and vendor reviews, while preparing evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001 audits and

Qualifications

• 5+ years in data governance, data security, GRC, privacy engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with modern data platforms (lakehouse/warehouse, SQL engines, BI, semantic layers).
• Solid grasp of data governance frameworks (DAMA-DMBOK, NIST, or similar).
• Built or run data classification, access control, or entitlement review programs.
• Familiar with cloud data platforms (GCP a plus) and analytics tooling.
• Knowledge of privacy and regulatory requirements in financial services.
• Experience supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar audits.
• Strong written and verbal communication; organized and detail-oriented.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain data governance policies, classification standards, ownership model, and exception process.
• Own data access governance for the lakehouse and analytics stack, including entitlement standards.
• Work with Data Engineering on controls such as Ranger policies and schema restrictions.
• Set data quality standards and track improvements with data teams.
• Keep data inventory, metadata, and lineage documentation current for compliance.
• Review data vendors and new use cases with Security, Privacy, and Legal.
• Support cross-border data requests, including PII handling and regional data flows.
• Prepare evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001, CSA STAR, and regulatory exams.
• Track data risks and control gaps as part of the ERM program.
• Be the go-to governance partner for Data and Security on access and tooling.

Skills

Data governance

Data security

Privacy engineering

GRC

Tools

Trino

Apache Ranger

dbt

Cube

Metabase

Airflow

Iceberg

Job description

Alpaca is seeking an experienced Lead, Data Governance to shape and run our governance and security program across a global lakehouse, analytics tools, and internal data products. You will define classifications, access controls, and data protection standards in collaboration with Data Engineering and Data Science.

With a fast-growing environment spanning US, Japan, EU and beyond, you will lead data quality, inventory, and vendor reviews, while preparing evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001 audits and