Data Governance Manager

We're the UK's largest ports operator with a network of 21 ports around Britain. We handle around one quarter of the UK's seaborne trade and contribute £7.5 billion to our economy every year. We're transforming our business and embracing the future. We offer a vast range of roles spanning the UK, all rooted in a culture that welcomes diversity, fosters talent, encourages internal movement and progression, and places safety as our number one priority.

The Role: Data Governance Manager

Purpose: ABP doesn't yet have a mature data governance capability. This role exists to build one from the ground up, covering policy, quality, stewardship, metadata, master data, and privacy. DAMA DMBOK gives you the framework, but the focus stays on what matters most to ABP now, not full-scope theory. The model is federated: business domains own their data, while you set the standards, build the capability, and run the forums and tools that hold it together.

Accountabilities:

• You’ll build and continuously improve ABP’s data governance framework: policies, standards, decision rights, forums, and controls that make data a real business asset.
• You’ll define who owns what, a clear ownership and stewardship model with roles, RACI, and escalation routes across a federated structure.
• You’ll run the governance forums, including the Council and stewardship forum, keeping cadence, escalating issues, and following through on decisions.
• You’ll set data quality standards and scorecards, and work with stakeholders to fix problems at the source, not just monitor them.
• You’ll drive metadata, lineage, and a shared business glossary so people can find, trust, and trace priority data, especially where it feeds regulatory, financial, or AI reporting.
• You’ll embed classification, retention, access, privacy, and security controls with Legal, Risk, Compliance, and Security, escalating and evidencing data protection issues to the DPO.
• You’ll support master and reference data governance, including standards, stewardship, golden records, and matching, to drive consistency across the business.
• You’ll make sure governance comes before scale, setting the guardrails new data products and AI use cases need before going beyond a pilot.
• You’ll partner with architecture and platform teams to bake governance into the platform and pick the right tooling, including catalogue, quality, lineage, and MDM, rather than bolt it on afterwards.

About you:

You will be someone who gets as much energy from persuading a sceptical stakeholder to writing the standard itself. You genuinely enjoy turning something people find dull into something they act on - someone who's comfortable that early progress often looks like stakeholder management more than policy writing. You're comfortable being the person in the room saying no, even if it's a director who wants to skip a control. You're resistant to slow progress and repeated pushback on governance change.

Skills, Experience & Qualifications Essential:

• You've built data governance frameworks from scratch before.
• You've written the policies, set the standards, and made them stick.
• You can point to concrete examples, not just involvement.
• You know DAMA DMBOK (or an equivalent framework) and UK GDPR well enough to build governance that evidences the right controls, focused on governance, quality, metadata, master data, security, and architecture.
• You turn data quality, metadata, and lineage concepts into working processes, not just policy documents that sit on a shelf.
• You can win over sceptical, non-technical stakeholders, and have real stories of doing it under resistance.
• You're comfortable with governance tooling, including metadata/catalogue, lineage, quality monitoring, MDM, and Purview, and confident working in Microsoft, SAP, and cloud environments.

When joining ABP you will find an environment that is both welcoming and challenging. We reward our employees well and offer a generous remuneration package, employer pension, private health insurance and a range of other benefits. Please note that ABP undertake random screening for substance abuse and operate a zero-tolerance policy. A medical will be required before starting this position also. We are an equal opportunities employer and we welcome applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their background, which helps us to provide a diverse and inclusive working environment. As part of our recruitment process, all successful candidates will be subject to pre-employment screening to Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS).