Hiring: Director, Data Governance Company: WHOOP Location: Boston, MA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-10 11:48:42 Target Skills & Keywords : Accessibility, Airflow, Change Management, GDPR, HIPAA, RBAC, Snowflake, dbt About the job Experience: •10+ years in data, engineering, or data governance roles, with a strong background in data governance, data quality, data engineering, or data platform, and at least 4 years leading and building teams. •At least 4 years leading and building teams. Required Skills: •Define and lead the data governance strategy, operating model, and roadmap spanning data ownership, contracts, event taxonomy, cataloging, access policy, data quality standards, and privacy and compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA), aligned with the DAA strategy. •Build, lead, and coach a small, senior team, developing your people while partnering closely with Staff level technical leaders across the org. •Establish a formal data ownership model, partnering with engineering and business stakeholders to assign stewardship and accountability for critical datasets. •Define the standards for data contracts between producing and consuming teams, covering schema stability, SLA adherence, and breaking-change management, with implementation owned by Data Platform & Engineering. •Own the event taxonomy governance framework, bringing structure to event tracking and standardizing how product and engineering teams define, name, and instrument events across platforms. •Set data quality standards (freshness, validation, monitoring) and the incident response expectations, partnering with Platform to operationalize automated testing and anomaly detection. •Champion AI powered governance approaches that proactively surface quality issues, ownership gaps, policy violations, and compliance risks. •Partner with GRC, Legal, and InfoSec to define the privacy, HIPAA, and compliance standards for how sensitive data is handled, which the platform then implements. Qualifications: •Direct experience building data governance programs or frameworks, ideally in a high-growth environment where governance was not yet formalized. •Deep hands-on experience with modern data stack tooling: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow/orchestration, and data catalog/lineage tools. •Solid functional working knowledge of healthcare data regulations (HIPAA), or willingness to develop deep expertise quickly given the WHOOP expansion into regulated healthcare products. •Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment on data standards and policies, and to lead highly cross-functional initiatives. Comfortable influencing engineering, product, and business teams. •Proven track record managing data oversight for complex research initiatives, such as IRB-regulated studies or trials or regulatory filings for the FDA. •Excellent executive communication and organizational leadership. Able to translate technical governance concepts into business value for non-technical stakeholders and senior leadership. •A player-coach orientation. Willing to be deeply hands-on while building repeatable processes and growing a team. •Strong commitment to embracing and leveraging AI tools in day-to-day tasks, ensuring AI-assisted work aligns with the same high-quality standards as personal contributions. •This role is based in the WHOOP office located in Boston, MA. The successful candidate must be prepared to relocate if necessary to work out of the Boston, MA office. •Interested in the role, but don’t meet every qualification? We encourage you to still apply! At WHOOP, we believe there is much more to a candidate than what is written on paper, and we value character as much as experience. As we continue to build a diverse and inclusive environment, we encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply. Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!