Senior Data Manager in Edinburgh

Wood Mackenzie is the global data and analytics business for the renewables, energy, and natural resources industries. Enhanced by technology and enriched by human intelligence, we cover the entire supply chain with unparalleled breadth and depth, backed by over 50 years’ experience. Our team of over 2,400 experts, operating across 30 global locations, are enabling customers’ decisions through real-time analytics, consultancy, events, and thought leadership.

Role Purpose

We’re looking for an experienced data governance leader to establish and embed robust governance across our data platform, with a primary focus on Snowflake. This role drives alignment between data governance, architecture, and engineering, ensuring that governance principles are built into the platform from day one — enabling trusted, secure, high-quality data across the organisation. You’ll design and operationalise the governance framework (policies, standards, roles, stewardship) and work hands-on with the data platform team to implement practical controls and tooling within dbt and Snowflake. This is a high-impact position at the centre of our enterprise data strategy.

Main Responsibilities

• Governance Framework & Strategy: Define and implement the organisation’s data governance framework for the Snowflake data platform — including policies, standards, stewardship and ownership models. Establish and chair data governance working groups or forums; provide direction on data quality, lineage, and metadata practices. Create clear roles and responsibilities for data owners, stewards and consumers.
• Platform Governance Enablement: Partner with the Data Platform Owner, Data Architecture and Engineering teams to embed governance controls and standards directly into the Snowflake environment. Design and oversee access governance (roles, privileges, masking, data-sharing policies) using dbt and Snowflake’s native features. Define and monitor data quality, lineage, and metadata management processes. Support the integration of data cataloguing, metadata and lineage tools (DataHub). Develop standards for data modelling and naming.
• Data Quality: Lead initiatives to improve data accuracy, consistency and completeness. Provide visibility of governance metrics — including data quality KPIs, platform audit results and adoption measures. Act as a bridge between technical and business teams — translating governance principles into actionable engineering and operational practices. Coach and mentor colleagues on data governance, literacy and best practices. Work closely with business units to align governance with strategic data needs.

About You

• Proven experience designing and implementing data governance frameworks within an enterprise environment.
• Hands-on experience with dbt and Snowflake (e.g., schema design, access roles, data validation and data-sharing).
• Strong knowledge of data warehousing / modern data platform concepts (e.g. ELT, dbt, medallion architecture).
• Understanding of metadata management, data lineage, data quality and stewardship practices.
• Familiarity with cloud ecosystems (AWS).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills — able to engage technical engineers, architects, and senior business leaders.
• Ability to define governance metrics, KPIs, and reporting processes.
• Experience with governance tooling (DataHub).
• Background in data engineering, data architecture or analytics.
• Certification in data governance or data management (e.g. DAMA, CDMP) is advantageous.

As a Leader You Will Be Expected To:

• Communicate the purpose and direction of our data strategy with clarity and enthusiasm, creating shared ownership.
• Collaboratively develop high level plans and strategies that clearly define required outcomes and key results.
• Approach business challenges with a positive and solution-oriented attitude.
• Act as a mentor and peer coach.

We are a hybrid working company and the successful applicant will be expected to be physically present in the office at least 2 days per week to foster and contribute to a collaborative environment, but this may be subject to change in the future. While this is expected to be a full-time role, part-time or flexible working arrangements will be considered.

We are an equal opportunities employer. This means we are committed to recruiting the best people regardless of their race, colour, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.