Senior Associate - Data Governance & Stewardship Lead

Overview

Location Designation: Fully Remote

Job Title: New York Life Group Benefits Solutions (GBS) - Data Governance and Stewardship Leader

Location: Remote or Hybrid/Philadelphia, PA or New York Office

Reports To: GBS Business Data Strategy Lead

Employment Type: Full-Time

Business Overview: The GBS Data Governance and Stewardship Leader will establish and scale a sustainable data governance framework as part of the Center of Excellence (COE). This role is responsible for driving data definitions and quality, delivering best‑practice training, and ensuring adherence to governance policies across the organization. As a key member of the COE Data & Analytics team, the leader will partner with IT and business teams to ensure that data can be trusted, remains secure, and is effectively leveraged to support strategic and operational decision‑making.

Role Overview: We are seeking an experienced Data Governance and Stewardship professional to lead the development and execution of a data governance and management framework. This role ensures data consistency, compliance, and integrity across financial and operational domains, including Sales, Underwriting, Operations, Claims, Actuarial, and Finance.

Working closely with business leaders, technology teams, and data professionals, this role supports New York Life’s Data Strategy by enhancing data discoverability, quality, and compliance.

The leader will develop governance policies, standards, and best practices; drive stewardship and ownership across departments; and manage critical initiatives related to data classification, cataloging, quality, access, and usage. Additionally, this role monitors and reports on the performance and compliance of the overall data governance program, ensuring data is well organized, accessible, secure, and valuable.

• Develop and lead the implementation of the data governance roadmap.
• Play a key role in establishing a division-wide data governance framework, with a focus on governing data as an enterprise asset, addressing regulatory requirements, and protection of sensitive data through organizational behavior, policies and standards, governance metrics, processes, and related tools.
• Support the mission and goals of the cross-functional Data Governance Council.
• Collaborate with data product managers, SMEs, and engineers to capture business context, align it with technical architecture and strengthen metadata documentation.
• Expand metadata repository to include source-to-target data lineage mapping and Business-friendly names for technical fields.
• Drive adoption of governance tools through training sessions, user enablement, and data owner/steward playbooks.
• Support Governance Technologies:
  Assist in the implementation and maintenance of platforms such as:
  Data Catalog (e.g., Collibra, Atlan), Master/Reference Data Management (MDM/RDM), Data Quality tools.

• Lead the Data Governance Strategy: Develop and execute a data governance framework that aligns with corporate priorities, regulatory compliance, and business needs.
• Establish Data Stewardship: Build and manage a network of business and technical data stewards. Define roles, responsibilities, and operating procedures. Facilitate Data Stewardship meetings to drive adoption of standards and resolve issues.
• Operationalize Data Governance: Help bring our Data Governance and Data Management framework to life by embedding best practices into project workflows and everyday work.
• Organizational Alignment: Partner with New York Life’s Corporate Data Governance and Data Management teams to ensure alignment.
• Ensure Data Quality & Integrity: Oversee data quality initiatives including management of consolidated data sets.
• Enable Data Standardization: Provide data and business analysis support to harmonize data across the applications.
• Data Ownership & Accountability: Promote accountability and best practices for data stewardship across the organization.
• Policy and Standards Development: Establish data definitions, naming conventions, classification schemas, and metadata standards.
• Regulatory and Risk Compliance: Ensure compliance with privacy, security, and regulatory…