Associate Director, Data Governance-Commercial Operations

Kyowa Kirin is a global specialty pharmaceutical company backed by more than 70 years of breakthrough life science innovation, dedicated to discovering and advancing treatments for diseases in which unmet need is greatest. Based in Japan with worldwide operations, we work across the continuum from drug discovery to commercialization, guided by our commitment to patients and their families.

Our research teams, located in California and around the world, are focused on developing the next generation of antibody, cell, and gene therapies, with particular emphasis on bone and mineral disorders, hemato-oncology, and rare diseases. We accelerate development through collaborations with industry, academia, patients, and healthcare providers, and since 2018 we have introduced four new therapies serving patients with progressive illnesses often in need of new therapeutic alternatives.

Our culture is grounded in our values:
Commitment to Life
, Integrity
, Innovation
, and Teamwork/Wa
, and brought to life through the Kabegoe Principles, which define the behaviors and actions that guide how we work together to deliver meaningful impact for patients.

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and mindful of the countless individuals still waiting for their own breakthroughs. A commitment to making people smile unites our efforts. Learn more at

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.

• 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.

• Draft, maintain, and publish enterprise data governance SOPs covering access requests, patient data boundary rules, new data source onboarding, data quality…