Head of Data Governance & Enterprise Context Eng

Analytics & Data Science | San Francisco, United States | Remote, Remote | Seattle, United States

Atlassians can choose where they work – whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two. That way, Atlassians have more control over supporting their family, personal goals, and other priorities. We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity.

Data is a big deal  ingest billions of events each month into our analytical platforms, and dozens of teams across the company depend on that data to run the business. As AI systems increasingly consume our data alongside our teams, the standard has risen: data must be clearly described, accurately classified, explicitly owned, and demonstrably trustworthy before it can be put to use

Atlassian is looking for an Engineering Leader to join the Data Engineering team and own data governance and the enterprise context that makes our data trusted and AI-ready.

You will own the enterprise data governance operating model — domain ownership, decision rights, the governance council, and the steward network — setting policy for classification, access, retention, and acceptable use with Privacy, Legal, Security, and Compliance, and running data quality as a product . In parallel, you will shape the technical strategy and architecture for our data catalog, metadata, and lineage platform, and build the enterprise context that connects business entities to their ownership, lineage, and quality signals — exposed programmatically so that agents and applications consume trusted context .

You will shift governance left into data contracts, automated classification at ingest, and policy-as-code, define AI readiness as a certifiable state that continuously gates what data our models and agents can use, drive adoption across a federated organization.

At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. We follow consistent hiring practices and account for each candidate's skills, knowledge, and experience when setting base pay within the range.

Please visit  for more information on which locations are included in each of our geographic pay zones. However, please confirm the zone for your specific location with your recruiter.

This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.

In The United States
, we have three geographic pay zones. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires in each zone are:

Zone A: $238,500 - $311,375

Zone B: $214,650 - $280,238

Zone C: $197,955 - $258,441

15+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform, or data management, with a focus on data strategy, architecture, governance, and platform buildout

8+ years of experience leading data engineering teams, including leading senior and principal-level architects and landing architecture through teams outside your reporting line

Demonstrated experience standing up or scaling an enterprise data catalog or metadata platform — Data Hub, Unity Catalog, or equivalent — owning integration, adoption, and outcome metrics rather than tool administration

Demonstrated experience owning a data governance operating model end to end: policy, domain ownership, stewardship, classification, data quality, and controls that held up under audit or regulatory scrutiny.

Experience with a data-as-a-product or data contracts operating model.

Experience building a semantic layer, ontology, or knowledge graph intended for machine consumption, including agent‑facing metadata access such as MCP servers, semantic search endpoints, or context APIs

Experience across both corporate data domains (Finance, People, GTM) and customer or product data, with judgment about how their…