Director, Data Governance & Observability at Versant3

Versant Media’s Data Platforms team is the central data store across the enterprise. We unify disparate systems into a secure, well-governed, real-time data environment that powers downstream products, analytics, and content delivery experiences. We are seeking a Director, Data Governance & Observability to establish and operationalize data governance as a first-class platform capability. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can both design and implement governance mechanisms in code, while also setting standards, prioritizing work, and partnering across the organization. This role will start as an individual contributor with leadership accountability, responsible for building the initial governance and observability foundations. Over time, the role is expected to grow into a people management position as scale and needs increase. The Director, Data Governance & Observability reports to the VP of Data Platforms and works in close partnership with Platform Development, Data Products & Solutions, and SRE. Responsibilities Data Governance & Contracts • Define and enforce data contracts across platform services and data products, including schemas, expectations, ownership, and change management • Establish standards for data lineage, metadata, and semantic consistencyacross the platform • Own definitions for data quality (freshness, completeness, correctness) and how those standards are validated • Partner with Platform Development to ensure governance requirements are embedded directly into pipelines, services, and APIsObservability & Reliability (Data-Level) • Define data-level SLIs and SLOs in partnership with the SRE organization • Ensure contract violations, quality failures, and freshness issues are observable and actionable • Build and maintain platform-facing health and operational dashboards related to data services • Contribute to light executive-level reporting on platform health and data reliability (not business analytics)Hands-On Platform Development • Write production code to implement governance and observability mechanisms (e.g., schema validation, contract enforcement, lineage capture) • Contribute to shared platform libraries, services, and tooling that make compliant behavior the default • Review designs and code to ensure governance considerations are addressed earlyCross-Functional Leadership • Partner closely with: • Director, Platform Development on schemas, contracts, and platform enforcement patterns • Director, Data Products & Solutions on base dashboards, self-service enablement, and consumer-facing trust signals • SRE on alerting strategy, incident classification, and reliability standards • Help triage and prioritize governance-related intake and tradeoffs • Clearly communicate standards and expectations to engineering and non-engineering stakeholdersTeam Growth (Future) • Hire and mentor data platform engineers focused on governance and quality as needs scale • Gradually transition toward more people leadership and strategic ownership over time