We are currently in the middle of a migration to Databricks on Azure, making this a unique opportunity to shape governance from the ground up and ensure the new platform is built with quality, security and compliance at its core.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the data governance framework, including policies, standards and compliance obligations across the organisation;

• Define data security standards and access control policies, including classification-based access rules and retention and lifecycle criteria.

• Define the data stewardship operating model, including roles, responsibilities, escalation paths and governance procedures across data domains.

• Own data classification and ownership assignment, ensuring every data asset has a defined owner, steward and classification.

• Define data quality rules, thresholds and SLA standards, and oversee their implementation and monitoring by the engineering team and Junior Data Steward.

• Lead the audit of the existing governance framework and define the roadmap for aligning practices with the new Databricks on Azure platform.

• Work closely with the Data Architect and Data Engineers to reflect governance requirements in platform design and validate that what is built matches what was defined.

• Define documentation standards for data assets, including data dictionary, business glossary and data contracts.

• Coordinate with business and analytics teams to identify data owners and ensure stewardship responsibilities are understood.

Management Reporting

• Report on governance health to the Head of IT, including data quality trends, policy coverage and stewardship maturity.

Team Management

• Manage and develop the Junior Data Steward.

Personal Competencies

• Thoroughness, attention to detail and strong analytical skills;

• Good written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work across technical and business teams and translate governance concepts clearly for non-technical stakeholders;

• A mindset focused on continuous improvement and on building governance practices that people actually follow.

Professional Competencies

• Experience in the utilities sector is a plus (not mandatory);

• Experience working on or alongside a data platform migration;

• Understanding of data pipeline concepts, including batch and streaming ingestion, to define governance requirements at the data source;

• Understanding of data lake and data warehouse architectural patterns;

• Experience with data cataloguing tools such as Unity Catalog, Collibra, Alation or Purview.

Leadership Competencies

• Team management and development of junior roles;

• Collaboration with external partners and internal stakeholders (technical and non-technical).

Qualifications

Education / Further Education

• Software Engineering, Data Management, Information Systems or similar.

IT Know-how

• Python literacy: able to read and review scripts;

• Familiarity with orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect;

• Solid experience in data governance and data stewardship, including defining policies, ownership frameworks, classification standards, access control rules and data quality standards;

• Experience defining data security, compliance and retention policies in an organisational context;

• Hands-on experience with Databricks on Azure and Unity Catalog: able to navigate the platform, review access grants, catalogue structures and lineage configurations, and validate that governance requirements are correctly implemented;

• Strong SQL skills for querying, validating and reviewing data models and quality rules.

Languages

• Portuguese (Native);

• English (Advanced);

• Spanish (Basic Skills).