Associate Director, Data Governance-Commercial Operations

Associate Director, Data Governance-Commercial Operations

Princeton, New Jersey

Kyowa Kirin, North America is actively seeking an Associate Director, Data Governance for our Enterprise Architecture & Data Office within Commercial Operations. This is a newly created governance leadership role accountable for establishing and running KKNA's enterprise data governance program - the data catalog and business glossary, the data access governance model, the data quality management capability, and the governance policies and SOPs that support them - across the enterprise data lake and connected source systems.

The role spans Commercial Operations, Sales & Marketing, Medical Affairs, Market Access, and Patient Services, across the full KKNA portfolio.

The Associate Director serves as the operational bridge between the data platform team and the business functions that consume data - ensuring that data assets are findable, documented, trusted, and accessible to the correct people through defined, repeatable processes. Technical build, engineering, and provisioning activity remains with the Data Platform, Data Architecture, and IT teams; this role defines the standards those teams implement against and holds the organization accountable to them.

The Associate Director will help build the function from the ground up: including the catalog, access model, governance committee operations, SOPs, and the enablement experience for every data consumer in the organization.

The role partners closely with Legal, Privacy, and Compliance and operates within the boundaries those functions set, but does not author or own policies that belong to them. Success depends primarily on influence, facilitation, documentation discipline, and cross-functional credibility, supported by enough working familiarity with data platforms and data structures to engage technical partners with confidence.

Essential Functions:

Data Access Governance

• Serve as the first point of contact for all data access requests - triage, classify by data sensitivity, route to the appropriate Domain Data Owner, and track through technical provisioning performed by the Data Platform team.
• Maintain and publish data access request SOPs so that compliance and legal review is defined at the policy level - not renegotiated on a per-project basis.
• Administer a tiered access model across all enterprise data lake environments - covering data scientists, analysts, business users, and external partners.
• Conduct quarterly access audits to identify and coordinate deprovisioning of stale or excess access.
• Maintain a complete, documented access log across all data lake work spaces, with rationale for each grant and defined expiration dates.

Data Governance Operations

• Draft, maintain, and publish enterprise data governance SOPs covering access requests, patient data boundary rules, new data source onboarding, data quality escalation, and incident response.
• Own the operational cadence of the Data Management Committee (DMC) - agendas, minutes, action tracking, and the enterprise governance policy register - and prepare materials and recommendations for quarterly DMC sessions.
• Document end-to-end data lineage for critical datasets, from source system through ingestion to downstream reporting and analytics, in partnership with the technical owners of each layer.
• Serve as a senior point of escalation for data governance disputes, access conflicts, and policy interpretations across the commercial, medical, market access, and patient services functions.
• Define and maintain the Domain Data Owner model - assignments, accountabilities, and operating expectations - so that each business function is accountable for the quality and definition of the data it originates.

New Data Source Onboarding

• Oversee the compliant acquisition, use, and stewardship of data assets by coordinating with legal, procurement, and business stakeholders to ensure contractual, privacy, and data-use requirements are met.
• Lead the intake and assessment process for all new data sources entering the enterprise data lake - including business justification, compliance and privacy review, Domain Data Owner assignment, and DMC notification - with technical assessment provided by the Data Platform and Data Architecture teams.
• Ensure every new source has a documented owner, defined refresh SLA, data quality baseline, and catalog entry before promotion to production and downstream consumption.
• Partner with Data Platform Vendor, IT, and external vendors to ensure appropriate controls and quality standards are applied from data ingestion through downstream consumption.

Data Catalog & Metadata Management

• Own and maintain KKNA's enterprise data catalog - the authoritative directory of all data assets in the Enterprise data lake, legacy Synapse platform, and connected source systems, including business descriptions, data owners, refresh frequency, granularity, and access tier.
• Document business-friendly metadata for all active datasets and enforce consistent…