Data Governance Lead

Governance has been tried here before and it did not stick, for a reason worth being honest about: there was no executive backing. That has changed, and changed hard. Data governance is now a named material business control under Provision 29 of the UK Corporate Governance Code, with a board level attestation deadline in March. It is reported in the annual report. The CFO, who has done this before and understands controls properly, owns the agenda. The four priority data domains have already been signed off at executive level. Senior stakeholders are currently asking the hiring manager what they can do to help. That is an unusual starting position, and it is the difference between a governance role that produces a policy library nobody reads and one that changes how a large business runs. The scope Four data domains, customer, product, colleague and clinical, across a group carrying UK GDPR obligations, FCA regulated activity and sector specific clinical regulation. Genuinely varied data, genuinely different control requirements, at real scale. In year one you will design a proportionate framework, work out which data actually matters, land the policies, agree ownership, build a working steward network across the business, and produce the evidence the board needs to attest. You will not fix everything by March and nobody expects you to. What is wanted is a minimum viable framework that proves its value and can be built on. The ambition after that is significant: catalogue, master data, lineage, and in time the governance of AI as the technology roadmap matures.

One thing to be clear about There is no tooling budget in year one. This is deliberate. The organisation wants value demonstrated first and a business case for a platform built on evidence, not on faith. If your first ninety days depend on selecting a catalogue vendor, this is not your role. If you can make meaningful progress with a spreadsheet, a good argument and the right people in the room, read on.

Who this is actually for The technical bar matters. The human bar matters more. This role lives or dies on whether you can walk into a room of senior people who did not ask for you, explain why this matters in language they recognise, and leave with them on your side. Then do it again next week with a different team who are busy and unconvinced. You will need to tell a director their data is wrong without damaging the relationship. Hold your position when somebody senior pushes back. Make governance feel useful to the person doing it, not just compliant. Be pragmatic about what gets done first, and confident enough to defend what you have chosen not to do. You will work closely with the Director of Engineering and his data team, so you need enough technical depth to hold your own, without becoming the technology’s advocate rather than the business’s.

• Hands on experience building or substantially extending a data governance framework in a large, complex organisation, whether you owned all of it or led a major part of it
• A track record of establishing data ownership and running cross functional steward groups that actually changed behaviour
• Practical data quality experience, processes, metrics and reporting, connected to commercial outcomes
• Strong working knowledge of UK GDPR and information security principles
• The credibility to influence and challenge at senior level, and the resilience to keep going when it is slow

Helpful, not essential

• Regulated environment exposure: financial services, healthcare, clinical or similar
• DAMA CDMP, DCAM or CIPP/E
• Experience evidencing controls to auditors
• An interest in AI governance. Expertise is not needed, curiosity is

Sector experience is not required. How you work with people is.

£75,000 · Permanent · North West, hybrid Build enterprise data governance from a standing start, for a UK listed group, with the executive team already behind you.

Most data governance roles have already made decisions, and the role is already decided. This one is slightly different. A UK listed group is building enterprise data governance from scratch and looking for the person to design it, run it and be accountable for it. Not to administer a framework somebody else wrote, but to decide what the framework is.