Job Description

Overview
HarperCollins is seeking an experienced Team Lead, Data Governance to lead our Data Governance team and champion the development and delivery of high-quality, trusted, and well-governed data products. This role sits within the Data Management and is critical in shaping and executing our enterprise data governance strategy. The focus includes establishing robust metadata management practices (including data catalogs), taxonomy and ontology development, and supporting AI and analytics enablement.
Position Overview:
The ideal candidate will have deep experience in enterprise data modeling, a strong understanding of data governance frameworks, and hands-on expertise with data catalog and metadata management tools, preferably Microsoft Purview. Familiarity with Azure data services (e.g., Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse, Data Lake) is highly valued, along with experience or interest in developing and managing data products that support both operational and analytical use cases.
As a people leader, you will manage a small team of Data Governance Business Analysts and collaborate with data engineers, business stakeholders, and application owners. You and your team will be responsible for defining data product specifications, establishing data contracts, driving data standardization efforts, and ensuring governance policies are applied across the data product lifecycle.
This role combines leadership with hands-on execution and requires excellent communication, problem-solving, and cross-functional collaboration skills
Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy:

• Lead and grow a high-performing Data Governance team.
• Define and execute a roadmap for enterprise data governance aligned with the data product lifecycle and AI initiatives.
• As a data governance leader, you will be responsible for engaging with data product customers for prioritization of requests and developing a data product delivery roadmap.
• Work with various technology teams to implement governance solutions, standards, controls, and validations in source applications.

• Data Product Development & Governance:

• Govern the design, specification, and delivery of reusable data products using data mesh framework, ensuring data standardization and meeting quality standards.
• Responsible for developing data contracts, modeling the data products, creating data product canvas and creating field-level specifications with data dictionary and business glossary.
• Lead the design and implementation of a data quality health check system for on-going management of data products
• Lead the development with the engineering team.

• Metadata & Catalog Management

• Lead the implementation of a data catalog platform (preferrable Microsoft Purview).
• Design and manage enterprise-wide logical data model.
• Design and maintain business taxonomies and ontologies to enable structured discovery and classification of data assets. This will lead to creating knowledge graphs to support AI initiatives for natural language processing
• Perform SQL-based data analysis (querying, cleaning, transforming) to support governance and quality efforts.

• Collaboration & Communication:

• Lead data governance committees for various domains to align data definitions and maintain common schemas.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to document data inventory, definitions, mappings, and data quality rules.

• Data Quality Standards & Metrics:

• Develop and maintain data quality standards and metrics.
• Ensure consistency and integrity of data across systems and applications.

Qualifications

• Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Processing, or a related field.

• Experience:

• Minimum of 5+ years of experiencein data governance, data management, or data architecture roles.
• Experience in implementing Data Catalog solutions such as MS Purview or similar.

• Technical Skills:

• Hands-on experience with metadata management tools, data catalogs, and tools for tracking data lineage and documenting data glossaries and definitions.
• Strong understanding of data architecture, data modeling, and database designwith hands-on experience in writing and running complex SQL queries.
• Experience in implementing MS Purview Data Catalog or a comparable enterprise data catalog solution will be considered a strong asset.
• Familiarity with MS SQL Server, Azure Cloud Data Storage platforms, and advanced Excelfor data analysis and reporting.
• Working experience of defining Taxonomies and Ontologies for Knowledge Graph creation to support AI initiatives.
• Knowledge of ETL toolsand experience in data integration to ensure consistency across systems.
• Familiarity with technologies like BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Power BI, JIRA, Confluence, and Lucid Charts.

• Additional Skills:

• Experience working on IT projectsand strong knowledge of the SDLC process.
• Excellent communicationand interpersonal skills to work effectively across teams.

About HarperCollins Canada and Harlequin
Harlequin is a leading publisher of commercial fiction and narrative nonfiction. We publish more than 100 titles a month that reach audiences globally. Encompassing highly recognizable imprints that span a broad number of genres, we are home to many award-winning New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling authors. Harlequin is a division of HarperCollins Publishers, the second-largest consumer book publisher
in the world. Through HarperCollins's global publishing program, Harlequin titles are published in 17 countries and 16 languages.
Known worldwide for the quality of its list, HarperCollins Canada is the proud home of many bestselling and award-winning authors, including Esi Edugyan, Heather O'Neill, and Lawrence Hill. It is our vision to publish the best books of our generation and to work with authors over the length and breadth of their careers. Our authors are at the centre of everything we do. In addition to the Canadian publishing program, HarperCollins Canada is responsible for the sales, marketing, and publicity of HarperCollins titles from around the globe
HarperCollins Canada and Harlequin are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to equal employment opportunities. Employment decisions are based on job requirements and the skills,
knowledge, and experience of the candidate, regardless of any other factors unrelated to job performance.
We are also committed to ensuring that the accessibility needs of candidates and employees are considered and accommodated during the recruitment process.
We thank all applicants for their interest, however, only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.