Data Governance Lead

Introduction
University of the People (UoPeople) is the first non-profit, tuition-free, American, accredited, 100% online university. Today, UoPeople has over 170,000 students enrolled from more than 200 countries and territories, including 18,800 students who are refugees. UoPeople is accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC).
We believe that higher education is a basic human right and that it can transform not only the lives of students, but also their families' lives, their communities, their nations, and, by extension, the world. See President Reshef's TED Talk when he announced the founding of the University.
UoPeople is an innovative university, and we welcome team members who bring creativity and innovation to their roles. We're a fast-paced organization with remote teams all around the globe. If you're a self-starter who wants to succeed alongside a passionate team, we'd love to hear from you!
UoPeople is supported by the generosity of individuals and foundations, including the Gates, Hewlett, Ford Foundations, Foundation Hoffmann, and others. The University has been covered by The New York Times, BBC, NPR, Times Higher Education, U.S. News & World Report, and many other leading media outlets. President Reshef's TED Talk and Nas Daily interview about the University have more than 30 million combined views.

General Purpose
University of the People is seeking a hands-on Data Governance Lead to build and personally run an enterprise-wide data governance program that makes our data trusted, well documented, and compliant. This is a builder and operator role. The successful candidate will work independently with minimal direction, write policy themselves, query data directly to investigate issues, drive the resolution of data quality problems that originate across many university systems, and present outcomes credibly to executive leadership.
Acting as the bridge between business and technology, the Data Governance Lead will stand up our data catalog, improve data dictionary, and business glossary, establish clear ownership and accountability, and demonstrate the value of governance through measurable improvements. This person will be the single point of accountability for the university's Trusted Data Program aimed at improving data quality.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities
Work independently and own outcomes.  Operate as the self-directed owner of the governance program, setting priorities, driving initiatives to completion, and holding others accountable across the university without relying on day-to-day direction. This role carries the program, it does not simply coordinate it.
Design a Governance Framework . Create the data governance framework that defines data ownership models, steward roles, and escalation paths across business, operational, and technology units, establishing clear accountability for data assets, a structured issue resolution process, and definition sign-off.
Resolve data quality issues at the source.  Create and   lead the end-to-end process for detecting, triaging, investigating, and permanently resolving data quality issues that originate in source systems, integrations, business rules, and manual data entry. Personally investigate issues by querying data, trace root causes, assign remediation to the accountable teams, and confirm that fixes hold. Establish a closed-loop remediation process with clear severity, ownership, and prevention.
Query and investigate data directly.  Write SQL to profile data, quantify the scope of an issue, validate fixes, and build data quality checks, without depending on the analytics or engineering teams to do this investigative work. Comfort working directly in Big Query and reading across CRM, LMS, and warehouse data is essential, not optional.
Author governance policies and standards.  Personally write clear, practical policies, standards, and procedures, including AI tool usage, data quality, data classification, retention, and access standards, that a non-technical audience can follow and that meet regulatory requirements. Policy authorship is a core duty of this role, not a task to delegate.
Ensure compliance and protect sensitive data.  Ensure the university meets its regulatory obligations, including GDPR, FERPA, and PII protection. Run regular data quality audits, apply and maintain data classification, and partner with legal, security, and business teams so that risks are mitigated and data is managed responsibly.
Build and run the catalog, dictionary, and glossary.  Stand up and manage the enterprise data catalog and metadata tooling (Google Cloud Dataplex, Microsoft Purview), build and maintain the data dictionary and business glossary, and drive their adoption so that terms, definitions, and metrics are consistent across the university. This requires prior, hands-on experience rolling out these exact capabilities, not just governing them in the abstract.
Chair the Data Governance Committee.  Lead, and…