From the listing
About the role
As Lead, Data Governance, you will help build and run Alpaca's data governance and data security program across our lakehouse, analytics tools, and internal data products. You'll set the standards for how we classify data, who can access it, and how we protect it, working closely with Data Engineering and Data Science to put those standards into practice.
Our data environment has grown quickly, handling cross-region data across the US, Japan, EU, and other markets. We are evaluating new analytics and AI tools regularly and need someone to help us catch up and stay ahead of partner and regulatory expectations.
The team is fully remote. This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Chief Information & Security Officer (CISO) with a dotted-line relationship to Data Engineering and Data Science.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain data governance policies, classification standards, ownership models, and exception processes.
- Own data access governance for the lakehouse and analytics stack including entitlement standards and periodic access reviews.
- Work with Data Engineering on technical controls such as Ranger policies, schema restrictions, and service account management.
- Set data quality standards and help Data teams track and improve against them.
- Keep data inventory, metadata, and lineage documentation current for compliance and audit purposes.
- Review data-related vendors and new use cases with Security, Privacy, and Legal.
- Support sensitive and cross-border data requests, including PII handling and regional data flows.
- Prepare evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001, CSA STAR, partner security reviews, and regulatory exams.
- Track data risks and control gaps as part of the Enterprise Risk Management program.
- Help define guardrails for AI and agentic use of corporate data in analytics workflows.
What they're looking for
- 5+ years in data governance, data security, GRC, privacy engineering, or a related field.
- At least 2 years working with modern data platforms (lakehouse/warehouse, SQL engines, BI, semantic layers).
- Solid grasp of data governance frameworks (DAMA-DMBOK, NIST, or similar).
- Experience building or running data classification, access control, or entitlement review programs.
- Familiar with cloud data platforms (GCP a plus) and typical analytics tooling.
- Working knowledge of privacy and regulatory requirements in financial services (GDPR, CCPA, etc.).
- Experience supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar audits.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Comfortable as an IC with no direct reports in a fast-paced remote environment.
Nice to have
- Fintech, brokerage, or regulated financial services background.
- Hands-on experience with Trino, Apache Ranger, dbt, Cube, Metabase, Airflow, or Iceberg.
- Experience reviewing AI/ML and analytics tools.
- Privacy program or vendor/DPA review experience.
- CIPT, CIPM, CISM, CISSP, CDMP, CRISC, or similar certifications.
- Previous experience as the first governance hire at a growing company.
- Experience with Japan or EU data residency and cross-border data issues.
- Exposure to ERM or operational risk.
From the company page
Alpaca benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Our teams are not just global, we’re also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica).”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Alpaca
I like their clear views on the value of remote work, check out this quote from their careers page:
> "Our teams are not just global, we're also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica). By joining Alpaca you'll be part of a multicultural, international organization."
I also like that their Glassdoor scores are going up (now 3.7/5), and they have some solid testimonials. I'm a LITTLE wary of this statement that gives me a bit of a "hustle culture" vibe:
> "We're keen on that last 10% of effort and believe that the details do matter. If this sounds like you, then you're in the right place."