Data Governance Manager in England

Permanent position with a salary starting from £65,000 plus benefits including Pension, PMI, ShareSave, 6.6 weeks holiday, and Hybrid Working in Southampton, Store Support Office.

We believe anyone can improve their home to make life better. From our Southampton Store Support office (SSO), we equip our stores, our people, and our whole business with everything it takes to help our millions of customers create a home they'll love. Join us as a Data Governance Manager and you’ll be a big part of this.

Role Purpose

Business decisions made using data are only as good as the data itself, and customer expectations on how we use their data continue to grow and evolve. We’re looking for a passionate Data Governance Manager who can deliver on our ambition to embed governance strategies that are compliant with evolving regulations and customer expectations, create improvements in data quality and trust, unlock efficiencies in delivering use cases, and enable accelerated value generation.

What’s the job?

• Evolve & implement the B&Q Data Governance strategy & drive adoption of our Data Governance principles as key pillars of our data management process: Owned, Trusted, Secure, Available, Reusable, Ethical.
• Lead the creation of a comprehensive Data Governance framework that ensures data is collected, stored, transferred, processed, and shared in compliance with all relevant Data & AI regulations, while exceeding customer expectations for data quality and security.
• Establish & manage our Data Governance Clinic and Governance Committee to create oversight & clear routes for sign off to deliver on data & AI use cases across the business, collaborating with Legal, InfoSec, and PR teams.
• Consult & partner with teams across the business to establish clear roles & requirements for data governance, ensuring we’ve got the right people accountable for data and driving the implementation of our Data Governance best practice.
• Advocate and drive data governance literacy across the organisation, helping all teams become more confident in embedding data management processes, whilst enabling teams to efficiently make decisions, implement standards, and accelerate use and value from our data.
• Champion data ethics throughout B&Q by developing and implementing policies that ensure responsible data usage, transparency, and regulatory compliance. Cultivate accountability prioritising customer trust and data protection, aligning all data practices with the highest ethical standards.
• Lead on development of governance principles and ethics policies for AI use cases, and roll out in conjunction with partners in Tech & Legal.
• Work closely with Legal, DPO, and InfoSec teams to ensure data security, governance, and privacy policies and processes remain up to date and aligned with regulatory requirements and customer expectations.
• Lead programmes of work that deliver our data kitemark framework, ensuring our critical data assets are delivered in line with key governance principles.
• Work with Group Data and Group Infosec to ensure appropriate data security and availability restrictions are in place, especially to adhere to PII data regulations.
• Collaborate closely with Group Data Governance & Management, to co-create strategic roadmaps to improve governance & compliance, and bring the B&Q voice into consultation on our requirements across platforms, data, and tooling.
• Ensure robust process and documentation is in place to effectively manage data usage across the business, driving transparency, consistency, and mitigating risk.
• Stay up to date with external trends, best practices, new capabilities & legislation to ensure we remain compliant & iterate our practices to drive efficiency & best customer data management.

What we need

• Solid experience in data governance, AI governance or related roles.
• Proven experience in designing and implementing data governance frameworks, and leading on embedding data ownership and data governance literacy programmes.
• Proven track record of influencing stakeholders across broad business teams, evidencing understanding of how to support business initiatives and accelerating implementation of data use cases whilst driving adoption of governance and compliance requirements.
• Experience establishing and managing data policies, standards, and guidance.
• Expert knowledge of relevant regulations, e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act.
• Strong understanding of metadata, lineage, data lifecycle, data quality, and policy design.
• Demonstrated ability to lead, coach, and develop matrix teams to build data governance capabilities across Data teams.

What’s in it for me?

As part of a great team, you’ll be valued for who you are. We’re committed to making B&Q more diverse and representative of the communities we serve, where everyone can feel they belong and have equal opportunities. You will have access to a range of networks that represent our colleagues and allies and help us to continue to put diversity and inclusion at the heart of our business.

We also recognise that wellness means different things to different people, and we want to help colleagues be at their best and feel well by offering a range of benefits to help you. As well as a competitive salary, our benefits package includes an award-winning pension scheme, bonus, ShareSave options, 6.6 weeks holiday, payroll giving, an Employee Assistance Programme, shopping discounts, colleague wellbeing benefits, and lots more!

So we can support you during the application or interview process, please contact for any recruitment adjustments.