Senior Manager, Data Quality & Governance

Position Title: Senior Manager, Data Quality & Governance About the job: At John Burns Research and Consulting (JBREC), we are seeking a Senior Manager, Data Quality & Governance, to lead the organization’s data quality and governance initiatives. This role works as a peer function to the Director of Data Partnerships and Strategy, owning the internal standards, processes, and institutional knowledge that ensure JBREC's data is trustworthy, well-governed, and ready for analytics and AI applications. The position will also define and manage data contracts, maintain the company’s data catalog, and partner across teams to improve data consistency, usability, and reliability. The ideal candidate brings strong experience in data governance and quality management, along with deep knowledge of the real estate data ecosystem. Reporting Structure: This position will be part of the technology group, reporting to the Chief Data and Analytics Officer. Key Responsibilities: Establish and maintain enterprise data quality standards, governance policies, and monitoring processes to ensure data accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and usability. Define and enforce data contracts, business rules, and standards for data usage in compliance with contractual and regulatory requirements. Lead the maintenance of JBREC's data catalog, business glossary, and governance framework, ensuring alignment with the semantic layer, metric definitions, and existing documentation. Develop QC/QA processes, validation checks, and monitoring procedures to proactively identify and resolve data issues, inconsistencies, and gaps. Partner with data engineering and business stakeholders to prioritize dataset migrations, translate business requirements into technical solutions, and ensure continuity and accuracy of data logic. Partner with the Director of Data Partnerships and Strategy by providing structured data quality assessments and ongoing performance signals on third-party datasets, supporting ROI evaluations, renewals, and sunset decisions on the external data portfolio. Lead the extraction, documentation, and operationalization of proprietary business logic, calculations, and historical context currently held by individual SMEs. Reduce key-person risk by translating institutional knowledge into durable, governed artifacts in the semantic layer and business glossary. Serve as a data capability lead on JBREC's Data Set Governance Forum and Report & Metric Governance Forum. Contribute data quality and governance expertise to forum decisions and drive adoption of standards across data engineering, data science, and research teams. Collaborate cross-functionally with analytics, research, consulting, and technology teams to improve data consistency, governance, and usability across the organization. Qualifications: Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Economics, Statistics, Business Analytics, Real Estate, or a related field required; advanced degree preferred. Required: Deep experience with real estate, housing, or housing-adjacent (mortgage, building products, construction) data ecosystems, including fluency with property, market, and transactional data semantics. 7+ years of experience in data governance, data quality, analytics, or data management. Experience developing and enforcing data governance standards, business glossaries, data catalogs, and QC/QA processes. Proficiency in SQL and experience working with large relational databases and cloud-based data environments. Experience with Python, R, or similar programming languages used for data validation, automation, and analysis. Familiarity with ETL processes, data pipelines, and data integration workflows. Understanding of data governance frameworks, metadata management, and data lineage concepts. Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to identify root causes of data quality issues and implement scalable solutions. Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions and build alignment across cross-functional teams. Highly organized and detail-oriented, with the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment. Preferred Qualifications: Experience working with BI and data visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Looker for governance reporting and quality dashboards. Comfort using interactive analysis environments (Jupyter notebooks, Polars, pandas) for exploratory data quality work and validation at scale. Demonstrated experience leveraging AI-assisted tooling (LLMs, AI coding assistants such as Claude Code or Cursor, custom AI-based parsers) to accelerate data analysis, knowledge extraction from legacy systems, and automated documentation. Familiarity with applying AI to translate undocumented business logic into governed artifacts is a strong plus. Cover letters are required. Compensation and title will be based on skills, experience, and abilities, which can vary by person. We cannot hire anyone who currently or will in the future require any type of sponsorship to work in the United States. Join our team at John Burns Research and Consulting, LLC, a leading provider of independent subscription research and customized consulting services for the US housing industry. Our founder, John Burns, started the company in 2001 with the aim of revolutionizing housing market analysis to help executives make better decisions. Today, we have a team of 100+ highly passionate research analysts and consultants nationwide who work together to provide the most trusted source of US housing analysis and consulting services. Each full-time employee receives: $12,500 towards our comprehensive benefits, including medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, and flexible spending accounts including gym memberships and vacation assistance. a company contributes 5% of their salary and profit sharing to their 401(k), even if they do not contribute. Personal benefits, such as tuition reimbursement, training opportunities, flexible schedules for many positions, 15 days of PTO, 5 days off for Company winter holiday, 9 holidays, and the ability to grow and expand your career, and 50% company reimbursement of all your charitable contributions. At John Burns Research and Consulting, LLC, we are proud of our award-winning culture, which includes recognition as one of the top performing companies in both Great Places to Work and Gallup Employee Engagement, and we are Certified Evergreen by the Tugboat Institute. If you want to be part of a well-established, dynamic, and high-performing team that takes it to the next level, this is the perfect opportunity for you. Disclaimer: Nothing in this job description restricts the company’s right to assign responsibilities to this job at any time as critical features of this job are subject to change any time.