Data Governance Lead

About the role

At NetApp, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud.

Job Responsibilities

• Enterprise Governance Execution: Implement and continuously improve practical governance processes that strengthen business operations, analytics, reporting, AI readiness, and application outcomes.
• Business Application and Analytics Enablement: Partner with application owners, analytics teams, data engineers, and business leaders to embed governance requirements into platforms, integrations, reporting solutions, and decision-making processes.
• Stewardship Community Leadership: Guide, coach, train, and mentor a distributed community of data owners and stewards; clarify roles, reinforce accountability, and create reusable practices that enable consistent execution.
• Stakeholder Management and Influence: Build trusted relationships across functions and levels, facilitate alignment, resolve competing priorities, and lead outcomes without formal authority.
• Communication and Evangelism: Communicate governance concepts in clear business language, develop compelling messages and learning materials, and champion the value of trusted data throughout the organization.
• Policy, Standards, and Metadata: Apply and evolve enterprise policies, standards, business glossaries, metadata, lineage, controls, stewardship roles, and approval workflows across critical data and applications.
• Data Quality and Continuous Improvement: Lead the definition of data quality rules and measures, facilitate root-cause analysis and remediation, and use evidence to improve end-to-end processes and adoption.
• Cross-Functional Advisory: Serve as a credible advisor who can rapidly grasp business needs and technical architectures, identify practical tradeoffs, and guide teams toward scalable, sustainable solutions.

Job Requirements

• Stakeholder Leadership: Demonstrated success building trust, influencing decisions, facilitating alignment, and managing diverse stakeholders across business and technology organizations.
• Communication and Evangelism: Exceptional written, verbal, presentation, and facilitation skills, with the ability to make complex concepts accessible and motivate adoption at all organizational levels.
• Coaching and Community Enablement: Experience training, guiding, coaching, and mentoring a geographically distributed stewardship community, including developing playbooks, learning materials, and repeatable forums.
• Leadership Without Formal Authority: Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, navigate ambiguity, resolve conflict, and sustain accountability through influence.
• Business and Technology Acumen: Sufficient breadth to quickly understand business processes, application landscapes, data flows, analytics use cases, integration patterns, and technical constraints, and to speak with authority in both contexts.
• Analytics and Business Applications: Experience supporting governed data for reporting, analytics, operational decision-making, and enterprise business applications.
• Governance and Metadata Practices: Working knowledge of stewardship operating models, data quality, business glossaries, metadata, lineage, controls, policies, standards, and issue management.
• Enterprise Platform Experience: Prior experience with one or more of Oracle Cloud ERP, Salesforce, SAP CRM, Snowflake, or metadata management platforms is strongly desired.
• Ways of Working: Highly organized, flexible, and hands-on, with a tactile approach to turning strategy into practical deliverables and measurable outcomes.

Additional Qualifications

• Professional Experience: 10–15 years of progressive experience in data governance, data management, analytics enablement, enterprise applications, business transformation, or a related field within complex global organizations.
• Educational Background: Bachelor’s degree in business, information systems, data management, computer science, engineering, or a related field required; advanced degree preferred.
• Certifications: Relevant certifications in data governance, analytics, metadata management, cloud data platforms, change leadership, or enterprise applications preferred.