Director, Data Governance & Observability

TL;DR

Director, Data Governance & Observability (Data Platforms): Establish and operationalize data governance and observability in a central enterprise data platform with an accent on data contracts, lineage, metadata, quality standards, and reliability. Focus on implementing governance mechanisms in code, defining SLIs/SLOs, building dashboards, and partnering with SRE, platform development, and data products teams.

Location: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY (onsite, in-person interviews required)

Salary: 190,000-220,000 USD

Company

Independent publicly traded media company with powerhouse cable networks like USA Network, CNBC, SYFY, and digital brands like Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes.

What you will do

• Define and enforce data contracts including schemas, expectations, ownership, and change management across platform services.
• Establish standards for data lineage, metadata, semantic consistency, and quality (freshness, completeness, correctness).
• Define data-level SLIs/SLOs, ensure observability of issues, and build health dashboards for data services.
• Write production code for governance mechanisms like schema validation, contract enforcement, and lineage capture.
• Partner with Platform Development, Data Products, SRE on standards, alerting, and prioritization.
• Hire and mentor engineers as the team scales into people management.

Requirements

• 10+ years hands-on experience building production data or platform systems
• Deep knowledge of data governance: contracts, lineage, metadata, quality
• Enforce standards through code and automation, not just docs
• Solid software engineering: API/schema design, modular architectures, CI/CD, testing
• Familiarity with observability and SRE collaboration
• High ownership in lean, fast-moving environment; strong cross-functional collaboration

Nice to have

• Experience in large-scale enterprise or media environments
• Lakehouse architectures and ELT pipelines
• Analytics/BI tooling from platform perspective (Tableau, Power BI)
• Modernizing legacy data systems in cloud-native setups

Culture & Benefits

• Entrepreneurial spirit with innovation focus in media industry
• Health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off
• Equal employment opportunities, accommodations for disabilities
• Compensation based on skills, experience, location