Business Data Consultant; Hybrid

The Distribution Data Governance team sits within Benefits & Protection Distribution. We are the business-side stewards of Distribution data: the firms, financial professionals and relationships that shape how Principal’s products are sold, serviced and retained. We work closely with Enterprise Data & Analytics Governance, the Distribution Data Domain Steering Group, Sales Compensation Administration, Master Data Management, Privacy, Compliance and B&P Data & Analytics.

Together, we make sure the data behind partner strategy, and executive decisions is clearly defined, trusted and fit for purpose.

What You’ll Do:

• Serve as a Data Steward for Distribution subdomains, including Firm, Financial Professional and Distribution Relationships. Represent B&P in sub-domain working groups and bring recommendations to the Distribution Data Domain Steering Group.
• Write, refine and move business term definitions, data quality rules, taxonomy structures and entity relationship diagrams through certification. Settle conflicting definitions across business units.
• Link certified business terms to technical attributes in the enterprise data catalog, so definitions, classifications and quality standards carry through to the systems and data products that use them.
• Help designate Core Data Elements and Key Joining Attributes. Help data products built on the Enterprise Data Foundation reach full governance scores and certification.
• Lead root-cause analysis and remediation with Data Custodians, engineering and operations partners. Turn recurring issues into lasting controls instead of one-off fixes.
• Govern firm hierarchies, parent-child rollups and relationship mappings through acquisitions, consolidations and restructures. Assess downstream impacts on policy ownership, attribution and reporting.
• Contribute to data governance communities of practice, maturity scoring, newsletters and data literacy efforts. Mentor analysts and raise the team’s governance fluency.

We are looking for someone with:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Analytics, Finance, Business, Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of related work experience, with three years proven experience with a combination of reporting, analysis, development and administration
• Intermediate SQL, including profiling, validating and reconciling large datasets in cloud data platforms.
• Working knowledge of data governance disciplines: metadata, business glossary, data quality rules, lineage, classification and master data.
• Data modeling literacy: ERDs, cardinality, primary, foreign and surrogate keys, and dimensional modeling.
• Proven ability to lead working sessions to decisions and to translate between business, technical and executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in insurance, financial services or employee benefits distribution, especially broker and general agency ecosystems and firm hierarchies.
• Experience with enterprise data catalog or governance platforms (Data
  360, Ataccama, Alation or similar).
• Experience with data products, certification frameworks or data contracts.
• Technical experience with Snowflake, AWS, DB2, SAS, Power BI

How We Work:

• Steward mindset: You treat data as an enterprise asset, not a byproduct.
• Systems thinking: You see how a definition change propagates to a calculation, dashboard or report.
• Intellectual rigor: You validate first, and you show your work.

Salary ranges below reflect targeted base salaries. Non-sales positions have the opportunity to participate in a bonus program. Sales positions are eligible for sales incentives, and in some instances a bonus plan, whereby total compensation may far exceed base salary depending on individual…