R&D Data Governance Director — Build AI-Ready Data

Smith Hanley; Waltham (MA); Hybrid; USD 189,000 - 231,000; Full time

Job summary

Smith Hanley is seeking a Director, R&D Data Governance for a major pharma client in the Greater Boston area. The role blends strategy, policy, and hands-on leadership to shape how R&D data is governed, connected, and used to accelerate scientific discovery.

You will build the governance framework across discovery through clinical data, establish standards and stewardship, and partner with IT, Data & AI, and R&D teams to enable data self-service while ensuring compliance and data

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading R&D data governance in pharma or life sciences.
• Strong understanding of data quality, metadata, lineage, and access control.
• Ability to drive strategy across discovery to clinical data.
• Excellent stakeholder management with executives.
• Experience implementing FAIR principles and AI-ready data.

Responsibilities

• Build the R&D Data Governance strategy and multi-year roadmap across Discovery, Preclinical, Translational, Biomarker, and Clinical data.
• Establish the governance operating model, including stewardship, decision rights, standards, processes, metrics, and accountability.
• Drive data quality and standards across metadata, ontologies, controlled vocabularies, lineage, validation, and data management.
• Champion FAIR and AI-ready data principles, ensuring R&D data can support advanced analytics, AI/ML, and emerging technologies.
• Enable data self-service by developing practical policies, workflows, and access models that allow scientists and analysts to find and confidently use trusted data.
• Partner with R&D, IT, Data & AI, and Engineering to identify critical data needs and implement scalable governance and data-management capabilities.
• Influence without authority, serving as the key connector between scientific stakeholders and enterprise data/technology teams.
• Drive adoption and change through data literacy, training, communication, and embedding governance into everyday R&D workflows.

Skills

Data governance

Data management

Stakeholder management

Executive communication

Strategic planning

Tools

Data catalogs

Data lakes

Data platforms

Access-control solutions

Job description

Smith Hanley is seeking a Director, R&D Data Governance for a major pharma client in the Greater Boston area. The role blends strategy, policy, and hands-on leadership to shape how R&D data is governed, connected, and used to accelerate scientific discovery.

You will build the governance framework across discovery through clinical data, establish standards and stewardship, and partner with IT, Data & AI, and R&D teams to enable data self-service while ensuring compliance and data