Senior Manager, Data Discovery & Readiness

Position summary The Senior Manager of Data Discovery & Readiness leads the firm's business-aligned data readiness function within Strategic Intelligence, ensuring enterprise data is structured, governed, and delivered to support analytics, insights, and advanced modeling, and is fit for purpose for business use. This role defines and maintains data standards, drives data quality across systems, and shapes data structures to meet evolving business and analytical needs.

Operating at the intersection of data architecture, data integrity, and business insight, this role partners closely with the IT Data Architect and Strategic Insights to ensure data is both technically integrated and strategically usable. The position evaluates internal and external data sources, including emerging and AI-driven data, to determine quality, relevance, and business value, and delivers curated, high-confidence datasets that enable advanced analytics.

The Senior Manager also leads the Data Integrity team and establishes scalable processes to support increasing data complexity in a rapidly evolving data and AI landscape. Job duties and responsibilities Own data readiness within and across systems to enable reliable analytics, insights, and AI consumption. Define and maintain consistent business meaning and strategic context across data fields by establishing and enforcing processes, procedures, and standards that support proper use, shared understanding, and effective change management.

Drive data quality improvements within and across systems, managing challenges including data flows, single source of truth, field controls, and data accuracy and completeness. Align curated datasets to use cases in pricing, staffing, growth, benchmarking, and predictive modeling. Anticipate downstream modeling needs and proactively shape data structures. Evaluate the usefulness and signal strength of emerging internal and external data sources, including AI-generated billing analysis, time-entry efficiency data, predictive pricing signals, market intelligence feeds, and other relevant data sources.

Evaluate quality and fit by, where appropriate, bringing data into sandbox environments to actively understand and challenge what's available from third parties. Assess scalability, governance implications, business value, and AI readiness of new data streams. Determine which sources should be integrated, refined, or discarded. Lead the Data Integrity team to identify and resolve quality issues, partnering with data providers to ensure accurate reflection and movement of information and working with system owners to support tracking and controls.

Work closely with the IT Data Architect — who owns technical schema, ETL pipelines, warehouse architecture, and system integration — to align business objectives with technical infrastructure. Provide the IT Data Architect with business-context requirements for schema design and field structure, and collaborate on evaluating system changes and new integrations. Ensure enterprise architecture supports both governance discipline and modeling flexibility through ongoing partnership with the IT Data Architect.

Deliver curated, high-confidence datasets to the Director of Strategic Insights to support advanced analytics and predictive modeling, and iterate quickly to improve dataset performance based on modeling feedback. Ensure data lineage, definitions, assumptions, and limitations are transparent so insights teams can focus on analysis and storytelling rather than sourcing and cleaning data. Act as a trusted thought partner to the Director of Strategic Insights on data readiness and signal quality.

Provide direct oversight of the Data Stewardship Manager and their team of Data Research Specialists, outside vendors, and contractors (as applicable). Build scalable processes that allow the team to handle growing data complexity without sacrificing quality. Perform other duties as assigned. Job duties and responsibilities included are not exhaustive and may be supplemented as necessary. Reed Smith reserves the right to revise or modify job duties and responsibilities at any time.

Requirements…