The Senior Data Governance Engineer at Assent will define, enforce, and operationalize data governance policies, ensuring data is governed responsibly, securely, and in compliance with regulatory and audit requirements. This role is central to Assent's data governance and management function within the Product organization, working cross-functionally to ensure reliable, accurate, and trusted data powers business decisions.
What You'll Do
- Own the development, enforcement, and lifecycle of data governance policies (access, classification, retention, exceptions) implemented as code with Open Policy Agent (OPA) and integrated into CI/CD
- Implement and audit RBAC/ABAC; coordinate periodic access reviews, segregation-of-duties controls, and privileged access governance aligned with corporate security
- Author and maintain data contracts (YAML/dbt) to enforce schema consistency, data ownership, and SLAs
- Maintain a centralized policy register and SOPs for enforcement, exceptions, approvals, escalations, and reviews; provide enablement and training
- Partner with the Metadata Management function to define standards for metadata capture, ownership, glossary, and stewardship; align policies with catalog workflows without owning day-to-day operations
- Define requirements and drive coverage for end-to-end data lineage with Engineering and Metadata Management to support audit, impact analysis, and change management
- Establish and report governance KPIs (e.g., policy compliance, access review completion, exception closure time) and publish dashboards for leadership
- Evaluate and integrate governance tooling with our modern stack (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt) and leverage automation/GenAI for documentation and exception handling
- Provide recommendations to improve governance practices; ensure alignment with internal policies, privacy standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PII), and audit requirements
- Provide technical guidance and leadership to other team members
What We're Looking For
- Technically skilled and detail-oriented
- Experience defining, enforcing, and operationalizing data governance policies
- Experience with access controls and security (RBAC/ABAC), access reviews, segregation-of-duties, and privileged access governance
- Experience implementing data governance policies as code using Open Policy Agent (OPA) integrated into CI/CD
- Ability to author and maintain data contracts using YAML or dbt
- Experience maintaining centralized policy registers and SOPs for governance enforcement, exceptions, approvals, escalations, and reviews
- Experience providing enablement and training on data governance practices
- Experience partnering with metadata management functions to define metadata standards and align with catalog workflows
- Experience defining requirements for end-to-end data lineage to support audit, impact analysis, and change management
- Ability to establish, report, and dashboard governance KPIs (e.g., policy compliance, access review completion, exception closure time)
- Experience evaluating and integrating governance tooling with modern data stacks (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt)
- Experience leveraging automation and GenAI for documentation and exception handling
- Ability to provide recommendations to improve governance practices in alignment with internal policies and privacy standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PII)
- Ability to provide technical guidance and leadership to team members
Technical Stack
- Open Policy Agent (OPA)
- CI/CD
- RBAC
- ABAC
- YAML
- dbt
- Snowflake
- BigQuery
- GenAI
- metadata management tools
- data lineage tools
- governance tooling
Team & Environment
- Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, security, legal/compliance, and product organizations
