Water Business Group Data Steward

Water (BG) Data Steward

At HDR, our employee-owners are fully engaged in creating a welcoming environment where each of us is valued and respected, a place where everyone is empowered to bring their authentic selves and novel ideas to work every day. As we foster a culture of inclusion throughout our company and within our communities, we constantly ask ourselves:
What is our impact on the world? Each and every role throughout our organization makes a difference in our ability to change the world for the better. Read further to learn how you could help make great things possible not only in your community, but around the world. This role shapes how our data is defined, used, and reused across our Water Business Group and HDR.

We're looking for a Water (BG) Data Steward to help bring clarity and consistency to how data is defined, shared, and used across all Water disciplines and their embodied service lines within Water for HDR. This is a leadership role, not an IT or compliance position, and it plays a key part in enabling better business decisions, data reuse, and project delivery excellence.

This role is not expected to be the subject matter expert across all Water disciplines. Instead, the Water Data Steward defines how data practices are established, aligned, and sustained across the Water Business Group by coordinating and enabling subject matter experts and technical authorities within each domain. This role is ideal for technical leaders who are able to shape "how work gets done" and extend that influence on how data supports our business.

This role exists to empower our teams to define data once, understand it the same way, and reuse it confidently across projects, teams, and time.

Why This Role Matters

Across the company, we all rely on data to plan work, deliver projects, answer questions, and make decisions. But when data is defined differently from team to team, project to project, or region to region, it becomes harder to trust, harder to reuse, and harder to scale. People spend time reconciling definitions, rebuilding datasets, or explaining what something really means instead of using the data to drive decisions that move work forward.

Water Data Stewardship helps fix this at the source.

By clearly defining how our data aligns to proper business terminology, and by creating shared understanding of data for our delivery teams, this role will support turning our data into solutions that our Water BG and employees can confidently use, reuse, and build upon. It reduces confusion, prevents rework, and makes it easier for teams to answer questions to deliver their work without needing to start from scratch every time.

For project teams, this will result in less time cleaning up data and more time delivering. For technical staff, it means clearer expectations and fewer one ‑ off requests. For leaders, it means faster, more consistent answers and greater confidence in the insights they rely on. For HDR, it means enterprise & project data that is ready to support analytics, automation, and AI in a way that reflects how we work.

This role is about making data simpler, more useful, and more connected to the way we do business, today and in the future.

What You'll Do

• Establish and coordinate a network of SME expertise across the Water Business Group to define technical standards, while ensuring alignment to Water data practices and enterprise expectations
• Develop and maintain business-aligned data definitions for key engineering and technical terms that support structured data models, reporting, automation, and AI use cases.
• Use your technical network to build alignment and consensus around data processes, priority, and expected use.
• Promote consistent, responsible use of technical data, including access, data quality, best practice for format, and reuse.
• Support governance of externally sourced datasets (access, approvals, inventory awareness, storage, and lifecycle considerations)
• Promote data fluency across the Water Business Group
• Coordinate with the Technology Director to align data workflows and initiatives to Water BG Strategy
• Lead change management efforts to drive adoption of data standards,…