Data Governance Engineer at Assent

We are seeking a technically skilled and detail-oriented Data Governance Specialist to join our Data Governance and Management team. This intermediate-level role plays a hands-on part in strengthening how Assent governs, secures, and manages data across platforms and domains. The Data Governance Specialist will help define and enforce data governance policies, support access controls and data security protocols, and operationalize standards for metadata and data traceability.  The Data Governance Specialist will work closely with cross‑functional teams to ensure data is governed responsibly, securely, and in alignment with regulatory and audit requirements. This is a key position for supporting organization‑wide data initiatives, ensuring that business decisions are powered by reliable, accurate, and trusted data, as we continue to build out our data governance and management function within the Product organization at Assent. The Data Governance Specialist is a hands-on role that collaborates closely with partners across the engineering, security, legal/compliance, and product organizations, and serves to solve core governance challenges in our data ecosystem. Key Requirements & Responsibilities  • Support 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 monitor RBAC/ABAC; coordinate periodic access reviews, segregation‑of‑duties controls, and privileged access governance aligned with corporate security. • Contribute to the authoring and maintenance of 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. • Collaborate with the Metadata Management function to help define standards for metadata capture, ownership, glossary, and stewardship; align policies with catalog workflows without owning day‑to‑day operations. • Assist in defining requirements and drive coverage for end‑to‑end data lineage with Engineering and Metadata Management to support audit, impact analysis, and change management. • Track and report governance KPIs (e.g., policy compliance, access review completion, exception closure time) and publish dashboards for leadership. • Support the evaluation and integration of governance tooling with our modern stack (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt) and leverage automation/GenAI for documentation and exception handling. • Contribute recommendations to improve governance practices; ensure alignment with internal policies, privacy standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PII), and audit requirements