Business Data Consultant (Hybrid)

About the role

The Distribution Data Governance team sits within Benefits & Protection Distribution. We are the business‑side stewards of Distribution data: the firms, financial professionals and relationships that shape how Principal's products are sold, serviced and retained. We work closely with Enterprise Data & Analytics Governance, the Distribution Data Domain Steering Group, Sales Compensation Administration, Master Data Management, Privacy, Compliance and B&P Data & Analytics. Together, we make sure the data behind partner strategy and executive decisions is clearly defined, trusted and fit for purpose.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a Data Steward for Distribution subdomains, including Firm, Financial Professional and Distribution Relationships.
• Represent B&P in sub‑domain working groups and bring recommendations to the Distribution Data Domain Steering Group.
• Write, refine and move business term definitions, data quality rules, taxonomy structures and entity relationship diagrams through certification.
• Settle conflicting definitions across business units.
• Link certified business terms to technical attributes in the enterprise data catalog, so definitions, classifications and quality standards carry through to the systems and data products that use them.
• Help designate Core Data Elements and Key Joining Attributes.
• Help data products built on the Enterprise Data Foundation reach full governance scores and certification.
• Lead root‑cause analysis and remediation with Data Custodians, engineering and operations partners; turn recurring issues into lasting controls instead of one‑off fixes.
• Govern firm hierarchies, parent‑child rollups and relationship mappings through acquisitions, consolidations and restructures; assess downstream impacts on policy ownership, attribution and reporting.
• Contribute to data governance communities of practice, maturity scoring, newsletters and data literacy efforts.
• Mentor analysts and raise the team's governance fluency.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Analytics, Finance, Business, Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of related work experience, with three years proven experience with a combination of reporting, analysis, development and administration.
• Intermediate SQL, including profiling, validating and reconciling large datasets in cloud data platforms.
• Working knowledge of data governance disciplines: metadata, business glossary, data quality rules, lineage, classification and master data.
• Data modeling literacy: ERDs, cardinality, primary, foreign and surrogate keys, and dimensional modeling.
• Proven ability to lead working sessions to decisions and to translate between business, technical and executive audiences.

Qualifications

• Experience in insurance, financial services or employee benefits distribution, especially broker and general agency ecosystems and firm hierarchies.
• Experience with enterprise data catalog or governance platforms (Data360, Ataccama, Alation or similar).
• Experience with data products, certification frameworks or data contracts.
• Technical experience with Snowflake, AWS, DB2, SAS, Power BI.

Skills

• Steward mindset: treating data as an enterprise asset, not a byproduct.
• Systems thinking: seeing how a definition change propagates to a calculation, dashboard or report.
• Intellectual rigor: validating first and