Director of Data Governance & Data Quality

As Director of Data Governance & Data Quality at Vertex Education, you will lead the development and enforcement of data trust practices across a complex, multi‑entity environment, ensuring that critical data is defined, governed, and trusted for decision‑making.

Responsibilities

• Governance Operating Model & Business Ownership: Build and run the Data Trust Council, establish owner/steward models for enrollment, finance, student, school and other critical domains, and coach stakeholders on responsibilities for data quality and approval.
• Certification, Definitions & Data Product Trust: Create certification framework for data assets, maintain a metric registry and definition workflow, and partner with Data Engineering and BI to ensure certified datasets, dashboards, and reports are traceable, tested, and fit for use.
• Data Quality Incident Management & Root‑Cause Discipline: Design the incident process, define rules, tolerances and monitoring expectations for Snowflake, dbt and other tools; classify failures, route remediation and prevent mismatches from escalating to BI or engineering.
• Source Change Control & Data Impact Reviews: Create and enforce Data Impact Reviews for material changes, evaluate impact on metrics, dashboards and outputs, and coordinate pre‑go‑live requirements with business, technology, Data Platform, BI and Product owners.
• Cross‑Functional Partnership & Education Data Context: Serve as operating bridge among leaders, establish governance standards across shared systems, ensure privacy, retention, and security coordination, and translate technical lineage into plain‑language implications for executives and non‑technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in data governance, data quality, data strategy, analytics operations, data product operations or related data management roles.
• Proven success creating business‑owned data governance in a messy, multi‑system environment where source systems, definitions, dashboards and operational processes were initially misaligned.
• Strong technical fluency with modern data environments such as Snowflake, dbt, Tableau or comparable BI tools.
• Experience designing source‑change control, data quality incident management, certification standards and owner/steward models that drive actual operational behavior.
• Ability to distinguish source‑process issues, integration failures, data engineering defects, definition disputes, dashboard QA problems, timing/freshness gaps and user‑interpretation issues.
• Excitement to join a high‑performing team and grow a career focused on data impact and governance.