Data Governance Manager

Overview

Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni-channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with colleagues working in stores across several retail fascias in many markets around the world. JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE
100 publicly quoted company since 2019 and continues to grow in the UK and internationally. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry. To be a part of this successful company and help us to achieve this you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people-led, innovative and customer-focused organisation which provides operational excellence whilst identifying new areas of growth as part of our day to day objectives.

Data Governance Manager Role Overview:
We are seeking a delivery focused and pragmatic Data Governance Manager to establish, embed and scale data governance across the JD Group. This is a newly created role, reporting into the Head of Data Architecture, and will play a critical role in building the trusted, well governed data foundations required to support analytics, regulatory compliance, and the responsible, ethical use of data within AI driven innovation.

You will be responsible for translating enterprise level data architecture and governance strategy into practical, adopted governance operating models, starting with the Finance data domain and progressively expanding across the wider business. While the role has a strong strategic remit, it is explicitly hands on, particularly in its early stages, with responsibility for designing frameworks, configuring tooling, and driving adoption directly.

The role will play a key part in ensuring that data used to train, power and operate AI products is high quality, transparent, well controlled and ethically sourced, aligned to JD’s AI governance principles. Over time, the role will help shape and grow a wider data governance capability, contributing to the development of a group wide data culture where ownership, quality and trust are embedded by default.