Data Governance Manager​/Senior Manager - Hybrid

True Car is a leading automotive digital marketplace operating at the intersection of car shoppers, Certified Dealers, and OEMs. Our business runs on data: shopper behavior and pricing data, OEM incentive and marketing data, dealer inventory and transaction data, and increasingly, True Car+ end-to-end purchase and financing data. As that data footprint grows across products, partners, and platforms, we need strong governance to keep it accurate, well-understood, secure, and compliant.

We're hiring a Data Governance Manager to build and maintain True Car's enterprise data landscape: a living, authoritative map of what data we collect, where it comes from, where it lives, how long we keep it, and who can touch it. You'll work across Data Platform/Engineering, Legal & Privacy, Security, Dealer & OEM Product, Marketing Solutions, and Consumer Product teams to bring order and accountability to how consumer, transaction, and vehicle data move through True Car's systems — and you'll be a key driver of our SOC 2 compliance program.

The ideal candidate will be located near Santa Monica, CA, and available to work in our headquarters office as needed.

How you will contribute to True Car’s success:

• Enterprise Data Landscape & Lineage
• Build and maintain a full inventory of True Car's core data domains: consumer/shopper data (leads, profiles, contact info, on-site behavior, credit pre-qualification inputs), transaction data (True Car+ purchases, financing submissions, trade-in appraisals, dealer/OEM incentive redemptions), and vehicle data (VIN-level inventory, pricing, Value Report/pricing certificate data, OEM incentives).
• Document end-to-end data flows: consumer intake via , the mobile app, and affinity partner sites (Sam's Club, AAA, Navy Federal, American Express, etc.); dealer inventory and pricing feeds; OEM incentive and marketing data; downstream flows into the data warehouse, CRM/lead distribution systems, and analytics/ML pipelines used for personalization and lead scoring.
• Maintain data flow diagrams and a searchable data catalog (source, system of record, transformations, consuming teams) that stays current as True Car and new affinity partnerships evolve.
• Classify data assets by sensitivity (PII, financial/credit-related data, dealer-confidential pricing data, regulated data) and maintain consistent tagging across catalog and platform tooling.
• Partner with Data Engineering to instrument lineage tracking so new pipelines are captured automatically, not through manual after-the-fact documentation.
• Storage & Retention
• Maintain the system-of-record inventory: which platform stores each data domain (data warehouse, operational databases, CRM/lead management, data lake, third-party SaaS tools used by Marketing Solutions and Dealer Products).
• Define and document retention schedules by data type — e.g., active shopper/lead data, True Car+ transaction and financing records, dealer/OEM contractual data, marketing and advertising data — in partnership with Legal on requirements such as state privacy laws, FCRA-adjacent handling of credit-related information, and TCPA/CAN-SPAM considerations for consumer outreach data.
• Drive automated enforcement of retention and deletion policies with Data Engineering; audit for stale, duplicated, or orphaned data across environments (production, analytics sandboxes, vendor exports).
• Support secure decommissioning of data when partner relationships (affinity partners, dealers, data vendors) end.
• Access Governance
• Maintain a current access inventory: which roles, teams, and systems can access each data domain, and the business justification for that access.
• Implement least-privilege access controls in partnership with Security/IT, including role-based access for internal teams and scoped, contractually-bounded access for dealer and OEM data-sharing integrations.
• Own periodic access reviews and certifications; manage the access request/approval workflow for new systems, reports, and integrations touching consumer, transaction, or vehicle data.
• Monitor and remediate over-privileged or unused access as part of ongoing governance hygiene.
• SOC 2 & Broader Compliance
• Serve as a core…