Chief Data Officer - Corporate IT

Chief Data Officer

The Chief Data Officer ("CDO") leads the Enterprise Data Services team within Corporate IT, accountable for governance, quality, engineering, and stewardship of General Reinsurance’s core data assets. This role ensures data is trusted, secure, well‑managed, and delivered through modern, scalable platforms that enable business units to perform analytics, reporting, and decision‑making.

The CDO partners closely with business‑unit reporting teams to align data standards, platform capabilities, and operating model boundaries. The CDO is the enterprise authority on data governance, data engineering, metadata, lineage, and platform strategy.

This is a senior leadership role requiring deep technical fluency, strong governance instincts, and the ability to influence a federated global organization.

• Serve as the strategic partner to business reporting and analytics teams.
• Engage with the business on strategy setting and enablement.
• Collaborate with business leaders to prioritize data initiatives and ensure alignment with enterprise strategy.
• Define clear boundaries between IT and business responsibilities.
• Ensure business teams have the right data, tools, and training to succeed.
• Own and operate the enterprise data governance framework, including policies, standards, controls, and stewardship models.
• Establish and enforce data quality rules, data lifecycle management, retention, and classification.
• Lead metadata management, lineage, cataloging, and data access governance.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory, privacy, and security requirements (e.g., GDPR, NAIC, SOX, model governance).
• Partner with CISO on data security, access controls, and sensitive‑data handling.
• Own the enterprise data platforms:
  Data Lake / Lakehouse, Databricks, ETL/ELT pipelines and orchestration, data ingestion frameworks, Master & reference data services.
• Define and execute the data platform roadmap, ensuring scalability, reliability, and modernization.
• Lead engineering teams responsible for ingestion, transformation, modeling, and platform operations.
• Provide high‑quality, governed, production‑graded datasets to business reporting teams.
• Ensure platform performance, cost optimization, and operational excellence.
• Manage and maintain all reporting and analytics platforms (Qlik View, Business Objects, Power BI, etc.).
• Enable self‑service reporting capabilities within the business.
• Partner with the business on report development and maintenance.
• Manage decommissioning and modernization plans as the enterprise transitions to Power BI and Data Lake‑driven reporting.
• Define the enterprise data strategy and multi‑year roadmap with close partnership with the business.
• Partner with the Chief Architect to ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, cloud strategy, and integration patterns.
• Drive standardization of data models, canonical definitions, and enterprise taxonomies.
• Enable AI‑driven reporting, data products, and advanced analytics foundations.
• Lead and develop a global data organization including governance, engineering, and platform operations.
• Build a culture of data stewardship, quality, and accountability across IT and business units.
• Manage budgets, vendor relationships, and strategic technology partnerships.
• Represent data strategy at executive forums and with global business leaders.

Technical and Domain Expertise

• 10+ years in data leadership roles within financial services, insurance, or reinsurance.
• Deep expertise in data governance frameworks (DAMA, DCAM, etc.).
• Cloud data platforms (Azure preferred).
• Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Fabric.
• Data lakes, lake houses, and modern ETL/ELT patterns.
• Metadata, lineage, cataloging, and data quality tooling.
• Experience operating in federated data/analytics models.

Leadership and Strategic Skills

• Proven ability to lead enterprise‑wide data governance and engineering functions.
• Strong executive presence and ability to influence across business and IT.
• Experience building and maturing global data organizations.
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into business‑aligned strategies.

Collaboration and Operating Model Skills

• Demonstrated…