Job Description & Details
If you've ever used Zelle, you've interacted with Early Warning's infrastructure. This Data Steward Lead role sits right at the intersection of business operations and data governance, meaning you'll spend your days wrangling critical financial data, defining business metadata, and making sure millions of transactions remain compliant and secure. It is a heavy-duty governance role for someone who knows how to herd cats across cross-functional teams without losing their mind.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect to spend a good chunk of your week defining business terms, mapping out data lineage, and wrestling with data catalogs like Collibra or Alation. You won't just be writing rules in a vacuum; you'll be actively partnering with engineering and data owners to set up automated data quality monitoring for completeness, accuracy, and timeliness. When data quality issues inevitably pop up, you'll lead the root-cause analysis and drive remediation efforts while keeping stakeholders aligned through Data Domain Councils.
The Core Tech Stack
You need a rock-solid grasp of data governance frameworks like DAMA-DMBOK alongside hands-on familiarity with enterprise data governance tools such as Collibra, Informatica, or Alation. Because Early Warning operates in a modern cloud ecosystem, knowing your way around Snowflake, AWS, or Azure is essential for tracing metadata and validating systems of record. Certifications like CDMP or DCAM will definitely help your case here.
Interview Expectations
When you sit down with the hiring team, be ready to walk through a time you had to define data ownership across multiple siloed business units with competing priorities. They are secretly testing your political savvy and ability to translate complex data policies into plain English for non-technical stakeholders. They'll also likely throw a scenario at you about handling a critical data quality failure in a regulated pipeline, looking to see how you structure your root-cause analysis and escalate issues without causing panic.
Application Advice
To get past the ATS and grab the recruiter's attention, make sure your resume explicitly highlights your experience with data catalogs, metadata management, and regulatory compliance in heavily audited industries like financial services. Drop exact keywords like "data lineage," "business metadata," "data quality rules," and specific governance tools you've used directly into your professional summary and experience bullets so the automated screeners catch them immediately.