Senior Data Governance Consultant📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Data Sentinel is seeking a Senior Data Governance Consultant to support a strategic data governance and data management project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This contract role involves standards development, policy operationalization through direct engagement, and technical implementation. The consultant will translate governance concepts into practical operating models, data controls, metadata practices, data quality rules, stewardship workflows, and business recommendations.

Project Context and Company Overview

This role requires strong consulting experience and an understanding of the Saudi data governance landscape, including National Data Management Office (NDMO) and National Data Index (NDI) expectations. The consultant will articulate how data governance domains connect across business processes, systems, data ownership, data quality, metadata, classification, access, privacy, reporting, and operational decision-making. Data Sentinel, a technology and advisory company focused on data and AI trust, supports clients in operationalizing data governance, privacy, data management, and AI readiness. For this engagement, Data Sentinel assists the client with operating model development, governance practices, technical enablement, and business adoption to transition from standards and policies to day-to-day execution.

Key Responsibilities

The Senior Data Governance Consultant will work directly with business stakeholders, data owners, data stewards, IT teams, data engineers, architects, and governance leadership to operationalize data governance. Responsibilities include:

• Supporting the implementation and operationalization of data governance practices aligned with NDMO/NDI expectations and industry best practices.
• Defining and documenting data ownership, stewardship roles, governance workflows, and decision-making forums.
• Collaborating with business teams to understand critical data elements, business terms, data issues, reporting needs, and operational pain points.
• Translating business requirements into practical data governance, metadata, lineage, data quality, and architecture requirements.
• Creating and refining data catalogs, business glossaries, metadata standards, lineage views, and data quality rules.
• Mapping governance controls to practical evidence, activities, workflows, dashboards, and remediation actions.
• Facilitating workshops with business and technical stakeholders.
• Advising on the connectivity of NDMO domains from a governance perspective.
• Supporting maturity assessments, gap analysis, remediation planning, and executive reporting.
• Converting governance concepts into clear, business-facing outputs for leadership understanding and action.
• Working with data platform, catalog, quality, or governance tools as applicable.

Required Experience and Expertise

Candidates should possess the following qualifications and experience:

• 8+ years of experience across data governance, data management, data architecture, data engineering, business analysis, or related fields.
• Strong working knowledge of NDMO/NDI concepts in Saudi Arabia.
• Practical understanding of how governance domains connect across the enterprise.
• Experience with data catalog, metadata management, business glossary, lineage, data quality, data classification, and stewardship processes.
• Consulting experience, including workshop facilitation, stakeholder management, requirements gathering, executive communication, and structured problem-solving.
• Ability to create clear documentation, governance artifacts, business-facing summaries, and remediation plans.
• Experience working in complex enterprise environments with multiple stakeholder groups.

Essential Skills

The role requires strong technical and consulting capabilities, including:

• Proficiency with data governance and data catalog tools such as Microsoft Purview, Informatica, or similar platforms.
• Experience with data quality tools like Informatica Data Quality/Cloud Data Quality or equivalent.
• Knowledge of metadata, lineage, cataloging, and glossary implementation.
• Understanding of data classification, access control, RBAC, masking, retention, archival, and privacy-related controls.
• Familiarity with dashboarding, scorecards, KPI reporting, or governance metrics.
• Ability to lead structured conversations with senior stakeholders and ask strong discovery questions.
• Skill in separating symptoms from root causes and explaining technical/governance concepts in plain business language.
• Demonstrated ability to build trust with business users, data owners, IT teams, and leadership.
• Capacity to convert ambiguity into clear next steps, decisions, and deliverables, producing polished, client-ready outputs.

Preferred Qualifications

Additional qualifications that would be considered advantageous include:

• Prior experience supporting NDMO, NDI, SDAIA-aligned, or Saudi national data governance programs.
• Experience working in Saudi Arabia or with Saudi clients.
• Familiarity with DAMA-DMBOK or equivalent data management frameworks.
• Experience with Informatica, Microsoft Purview, or similar governance platforms.