Commercial Data Governance Lead, EMEA

We are searching for the best talent for Commercial Data Governance Lead | EMEA — Surgery & Electrophysiology (EP).

Purpose: Data is only as valuable as the trust placed in it. At Johnson & Johnson Surgery, the Commercial Data Governance Lead is the person who builds and sustains that trust across all critical commercial data domains, across all markets, and across all the stakeholders who depend on data to make decisions.

This is a Senior Analyst level role with a scope and visibility that punches well above its grade. Reporting directly to the Data Strategy & Capability Leader, this individual will own the operational and tactical execution of data governance across the EMEA commercial eco-system. Hosting governance forums, measuring data quality, driving accountability, coordinating Data Stewards and Administrators, and ensuring that governance is not a bureaucratic exercise but a practical, business-enabling discipline.

The right candidate brings solid commercial data experience, a genuine passion for data quality and governance, and the interpersonal strength to bring together stakeholders of vastly different data literacy levels and get them aligned, accountable, and moving.

You will be responsible for:

• Operationalize and maintain the end-to-end data governance framework across all critical commercial data domains in the EMEA region, ensuring it is consistently applied, embedded in ways of working, and felt across markets rather than sitting in a document.
• Own the governance calendar: schedule, prepare, host, and facilitate data governance forums. Bringing the right stakeholders together, driving structured conversations, ensuring every decision is documented and every action followed up to closure.
• Coordinate Data Stewards and Administrators across the region. Providing functional direction, aligning their efforts to the framework, and ensuring consistency across markets and domains.
• Own the core governance artefacts, such as business glossaries, data dictionaries, lineage documentation, ownership registers, and retention schedules. Ensuring execution teams maintain and update them to the required standard, and holding them accountable for accuracy, completeness, and timeliness.
• Monitor adherence to governance and data quality standards by tracking exceptions, escalating breaches, and driving root-cause conversations to ensure issues are resolved structurally, not just symptomatically.
• Ensure governance requirements are reflected in system designs, data models, and change control processes. Coordinating with System Owners (Business and IT) to keep standards embedded.
• Act as the central connector across a diverse stakeholder landscape. Driving awareness and adoption of governance standards across the region, ensuring governance conversations happen across silos and not within them, adapting style and framing to audiences of varying data literacy and seniority without losing the substance of the message.
• Surface patterns, gaps, and improvement opportunities identified through day-to-day execution. Feeding grounded input into the evolution of the governance strategy.

Qualifications / Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in information systems, Data Science, Business, or a related field or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience in a data-focused role within a commercial environment - data operations, data stewardship, data analytics, or similar.
• A Proven track record in data governance. You have built, operationalized, or run a governance framework before.
• Hands-on experience in data quality. Defining standards, monitoring adherence, driving root-cause analysis, and coordinating the implementation of preventative controls.
• Exposure to commercial data systems and landscapes is a strong advantage. Familiarity with ERP, CRM, pricing, or master data environments will accelerate your impact.
• Experience coordinating or working alongside Data Stewards, Data Administrators, or similar data practitioner communities.
• Exceptional communication and facilitation skills. You can run a governance forum, write a crisp decision log, and follow up on actions without being asked twice.
• Natural ability to lead through influence. You bring people with you through passion, clarity, and credibility, not authority.
• Highly proactive and self-driven. You identify what needs to happen and you make it happen, without waiting to be directed.
• Comfortable navigating a complex, multi-country stakeholder environment with varying levels of data maturity and literacy.
• Fluent English required; additional European languages are a strong advantage.
• MedTech or healthcare experience is a plus.

Required Skills:

Cross-Functional Collaboration, Data-Driven Decision Making, Efficiency Analysis, Leadership

Preferred Skills:

Advanced Analytics, Analytical Reasoning, Coaching, Communication, Data Analysis, Database Management, Data Governance, Data Management, Data Privacy Standards, Data Quality, Data Savvy, Data Security, Execution Focus, Information Security Risk Management, Privacy-Enhancing Computation (PEC), Problem Solving, Report Writing

Hybrid work

Why This Role

Data governance is often talked about and rarely done well.
This role is an opportunity to change that and to build something that genuinely works, in an organization that is investing seriously in its commercial data capability.

You will work at the center of a high-priority transformation, with direct access to senior leadership and the mandate to make governance real across a complex, multi-country eco-system. For someone with the right drive and the right mindset, this role offers outsized visibility, genuine impact, and a clear path to growing into broader data leadership.