Data Governance Manager

Since 2015, OakNorth has lent over $21 billion to ambitious businesses across the UK and US, helping create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs. We operate as a lean, high-accountability organisation where individuals own outcomes — not just tasks. This is a place for people who want to do work that matters, in a team that moves fast and holds itself to a high standard.

OakNorth manages data across a regulated, multi-jurisdiction banking operation spanning the UK, US, and India. As the business scales, the integrity, classification, and governance of our data is essential to the bank’s operations. This role exists to own that risk. The Data Governance Manager is responsible for establishing and enforcing the governance standards, classification frameworks, and accountability structures that reduce data-related risk across the Bank. You will work across business domains to embed data ownership, drive down open audit findings, and build the metrics that give leadership visibility into where data risk sits.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and enforce data governance standards across the Bank — setting clear requirements for data ownership, documentation completeness, classification, and quality, and holding domain owners accountable to them.
• Drive remediation of data-related audit findings and risk log items — take ownership of open actions, coordinate with business and technology stakeholders to resolve them, and track progress to closure.
• Implement and maintain the data classification framework — ensuring all critical data is classified by sensitivity, value, and criticality, and that protection controls are applied consistently and correctly.
• Build and operate governance metrics — establish a clear picture of data risk maturity across the organisation, including quality scores, ownership coverage, classification completeness, and audit trail integrity.
• Embed data stewardship across business domains — work with data owners in Lending, Finance, Business Banking, and Personal Savings to ensure accountability for data quality is understood and acted on at the domain level.
• Maintain the business glossary and data definitions — ensuring canonical definitions are agreed, documented, and kept current, so that data used in reporting and decision-making is consistent and understood.
• Use tooling (including DataHub) to operationalise governance — configure and monitor automated governance checks, PII and sensitivity tagging, and lineage visibility to scale enforcement beyond manual review.
• Work with the DPO to ensure our organisational controls are robust enough to comply with Data Privacy regulation.

What success looks like in 12 months

• Measurable reduction in data-related risk log items, with a clear trend line showing progress.
• All outstanding risk and internal audit findings relating to data governance remediated or formally tracked to a committed close date.
• Data classification coverage in place across all critical data domains, with documented ownership for each.
• A governance metrics dashboard in use by the CTO to report status.
• Data owners and stewards across each business domain actively managing quality and classification within their domains — not dependent on central intervention for routine issues.

What you’ll need

• Experience building & implementing data governance framework from the ground up in a regulated financial services environment.
• Strong working knowledge of data classification, data quality management, and risk-based approaches to data governance.
• Experience working with internal audit or second/third line functions to manage and remediate findings.
• Ability to influence without authority — you will work across business units where you have accountability but not direct control.
• Clear, confident communicator who can translate governance requirements into practical actions for non-technical stakeholders.
• Familiarity with data governance tooling (catalogues, lineage, metadata management) — you will use tools to scale your work, not rely on manual processes.
• Working knowledge of UK GDPR and the storage limitation principle, and how data protection obligations intersect with governance and classification frameworks.

Nice to have

• Experience in a UK-regulated bank, knowledge of US privacy regulations will also help as we expand our US business.
• Experience with DataHub, Collibra, Atlan, or similar data catalogue platforms.
• Understanding of data lineage concepts and how they support audit and regulatory obligations.

Benefits

• Equity. We want people to have a stake in the business so that all our interests are aligned.
• 25 days holiday.
• Personalized benefits – opt-in to what matters to you.
• Subsidised Private Medical Insurance with Bupa.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave.
• Wellbeing and social events.
• In-house Barista Bar in London office.
• Support causes that matter to you – Volunteering time off.
• Salary sacrifice schemes (Cycle to work, nursery, gym, electric car scheme).