Data Governance Engineer or not?

#14 Or how to add the missing piece

Hello 😀

A few weeks ago, I've created again a wind of craziness on LinkedIn.

With just one word… 🥁

“Data Governance Engineer” !

Street art in Marseille, a hate love state of mind

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Let’s dive into this role 👇

Agenda

1. What is a Data Governance Engineer?

2. Position, tooling & skills

3. Decide if you need one

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What is a Data Governance Engineer?

The first time I heard this word was from one of my customers. He asked me to reshare his job opening on LinkedIn.

Without even thinking one second that this role doesn’t exist. Yet.

🤯 And that's when it hit me. It should exist.

Let’s give a definition

A Data Governance Engineer manages the technical aspects of data governance, ensuring data quality, accessibility, compliance, and security across your organization.

They implement data quality checks, data lineage / cataloguing tools, and enforce governance policies across all data pipelines.

But it already exists, it’s just a Data Engineer !

Well, if it did, we wouldn’t have this amount of data governance issues, right? 😈

On Coursera, you can find the following definition of a Data Engineer :

“Data engineers work in various settings to build systems that collect, manage, and convert raw data into usable information for data scientists and business analysts to interpret.”

As you can see, it doesn’t mention anything specific on governance… and it is sad.

👉 Imagine a world where your Data Governance manager defines rules and standards with Business owners and then simply ask to a Data Governance engineer to implement them. Cool, right?

The Data Governance engineer could implement :

• Quality tests and alerts on pipelines

• Data contracts

• A semantic layer for all your BI tools

• A data catalog

And no, I’m sorry but not all Data Engineers know about all these topics.

Position, tooling & skills

It is a full time role, obviously.

I see 2 options here :

• There is a Data Team led by a Chief Data Officer who is also covering Data Governance topics

  • The Data Governance Engineer will join this team

• There is a Tech Team led by a Chief Information Officer

  • The Data Governance Engineer will join this team

Keep in mind that it’s a technical role.

To grow and develop, the Data Governance Engineer should be working with Data Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Software developers, etc.

Is this a data mesh role?

I think this role is even more relevant in a Data Mesh organization, where there is decentralized ownership in various domains.

The Data Governance Engineer can then help to maintain interoperability, data quality frameworks, and compliance.

But what makes a good Data Governance Engineer?

A good Data Governance Engineer possesses a mix of technical and analytical skills combined with a deep understanding of data management.

A Data Engineer can totally take on progressively this role by adding a few skills.

Key qualities include :

• Strong understanding of data governance frameworks (e.g., data quality, data privacy, metadata management)

• Collaboration skills, as they work closely with data stewards, domain leads, and data engineering teams to establish best practices

• Expertise in data modeling, lineage tracking, and cataloging tools

• Ability to automate governance processes where possible, improving efficiency

Common tools include :

1. Data catalogs

2. Data quality tools

3. Master data management tools

4. Data integration platforms

Decide if you need one

Not every company will benefit from hiring a Data Governance Engineer.

Let’s see if it’s the right move for your organization :

If you have :

• More "Yes" responses : Strong indication that you need a Data Governance Engineer to handle complexity, ensure data quality and enforce ownership

• More "No" responses: If your data landscape is manageable, relatively minimal, centralized, and already well-governed, you might not need this role immediately.

Still, I think we need Data Governance Engineering because the complexity, scale, and decentralization of modern data ecosystems demand more than just traditional governance practices.

We’re going towards self-service analytics and data democratization.

👉 This is only possible with clear governance, otherwise you’ll have people doing crazy things with data.

Data Governance Engineering automates, enforces policies and operationalizes governance processes, making it possible to scale governance efforts across disparate teams and domains.

Want more about Data Governance Engineering?

You should checkout the following resources :

Ananth Packkildurai

and

Modern Data 101

.

See you soon,

Charlotte

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I'm Charlotte Ledoux, freelance in Data & AI Governance.

You can follow me on Linkedin !