Data Governance Steward: Quality & Compliance Lead

EXL; United States; Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

EXL is seeking a senior Data Governance Lead to strengthen data ownership, metadata standards, and data lineage across enterprise data domains. You will collaborate with Business, Data Product, Engineering, Privacy and Cybersecurity teams to implement governance policies and drive data quality initiatives.

The role requires 7+ years in data governance or data management, strong SQL skills, and experience with cloud data platforms and governance tools such as Unity Catalog, Collibra, Alation, or

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data governance, data stewardship, data quality, or data management.
• Strong knowledge of metadata, lineage, data classification, access governance, and privacy.
• Experience defining and monitoring data quality rules, KPIs, and remediation processes.
• Experience with data contracts, schema governance, data-quality SLAs, and change management.
• Working knowledge of SQL and cloud-based data platforms.
• Experience with catalog/governance tools like Unity Catalog, Collibra, Alation, or Informatica.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain data ownership, glossaries, CDEs, dictionaries, and metadata standards.
• Establish and monitor data quality rules, controls, and thresholds; coordinate remediation.
• Classify PII and sensitive data with access controls and retention policies.
• Document end-to-end data lineage across source systems and pipelines.
• Support governance for data modernization, including migration to AWS and Databricks.
• Facilitate cross-functional governance forums to align data definitions and ownership.
• Develop governance policies, standards, processes, metrics, and reporting.
• Define and enforce data contracts including ownership and usage guidelines.
• Partner with data modelers/engineers/product to manage contract lifecycle and change management.
• Drive adoption of data governance best practices and accountability.

Skills

Data governance

Data stewardship

Data quality

Metadata lineage

Data classification

Privacy compliance

SQL

Databricks Unity Catalog

Collibra

Alation

Informatica

Stakeholder management

Communication

Tools

Databricks Unity Catalog

Collibra

Alation

Informatica

Job description

EXL is seeking a senior Data Governance Lead to strengthen data ownership, metadata standards, and data lineage across enterprise data domains. You will collaborate with Business, Data Product, Engineering, Privacy and Cybersecurity teams to implement governance policies and drive data quality initiatives.

The role requires 7+ years in data governance or data management, strong SQL skills, and experience with cloud data platforms and governance tools such as Unity Catalog, Collibra, Alation, or