Director, Data Governance & Observability

Company Description

VERSANT is a leading force in news, sports and entertainment - home to iconic and trusted brands that inspire, inform, and delight audiences. Our unique combination of content, technology and services enriches the cultural fabric, igniting passions, sparking conversations, and connecting people to what they love most.

As an independent, publicly traded company, VERSANT brings together powerhouse cable networks - including USA Network, CNBC, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Golf Channel - with dynamic digital and direct-to-consumer brands such as Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow, GolfPass, and SportsEngine. Together, these businesses reflect our commitment to delivering exceptional experiences across every screen and service.

VERSANT is an industry-changing media company fueled by innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. With a strong foundation and a forward-looking vision, VERSANT empowers creativity, embraces change, and drives connection in an ever-evolving world.

Job Description

Versant Media’s Data Platforms team is the central data store across the enterprise. We unify disparate systems into a secure, well-governed, real-time data environment that powers downstream products, analytics, and content delivery experiences.

We are seeking a Director, Data Governance & Observability to establish and operationalize data governance as a first-class platform capability. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can both design and implement governance mechanisms in code, while also setting standards, prioritizing work, and partnering across the organization.

This role will start as an individual contributor with leadership accountability, responsible for building the initial governance and observability foundations. Over time, the role is expected to grow into a people management position as scale and needs increase.

The Director, Data Governance & Observability reports to the VP of Data Platforms and works in close partnership with Platform Development, Data Products & Solutions, and SRE.

Responsibilities

Data Governance & Contracts

• Define and enforce data contracts across platform services and data products, including schemas, expectations, ownership, and change management
• Establish standards for data lineage, metadata, and semantic consistency

across the platform

• Own definitions for data quality (freshness, completeness, correctness) and how those standards are validated
• Partner with Platform Development to ensure governance requirements are embedded directly into pipelines, services, and APIs

Observability & Reliability (Data-Level)

• Define data-level SLIs and SLOs in partnership with the SRE organization
• Ensure contract violations, quality failures, and freshness issues are observable and actionable
• Build and maintain platform-facing health and operational dashboards related to data services
• Contribute to light executive-level reporting on platform health and data reliability (not business analytics)

Hands-On Platform Development

• Write production code to implement governance and observability mechanisms (e.g., schema validation, contract enforcement, lineage capture)
• Contribute to shared platform libraries, services, and tooling that make compliant behavior the default
• Review designs and code to ensure governance considerations are addressed early

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner closely with:
  • Director, Platform Development on schemas, contracts, and platform enforcement patterns
  • Director, Data Products & Solutions on base dashboards, self-service enablement, and consumer-facing trust signals
  • SRE on alerting strategy, incident classification, and reliability standards

• Help triage and prioritize governance-related intake and tradeoffs
• Clearly communicate standards and expectations to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders

Team Growth (Future)

• Hire and mentor data platform engineers focused on governance and quality as needs scale
• Gradually transition toward more people leadership and strategic ownership over time

Qualifications

• 10+ years Strong hands-on experience building production data or platform systems
• Deep understanding of data governance concepts, including contracts, lineage, metadata, and quality
• Experience defining and enforcing standards through code and automation, not just documentation
• Solid software engineering foundation, including:
  • API and schema design
  • Modular or service-oriented architectures
  • Automated testi