Senior Data Governance Engineer 

Data is playing an increasingly important role within Alliander. To truly make broad use of data, it must be clear what data is available, where it comes from, what its quality is, and who is responsible for it. Alliander is therefore structuring its data landscape according to the principles of Data Mesh and FAIR: data must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Governance is centrally defined in this context but implemented as much as possible in a decentralized manner by the organizational units responsible for the data.  

As a Senior Data Governance Engineer, you’ll help put these principles into practice from a technical standpoint. This means you won’t just be working on data governance as a process or policy. Rather, translating these principles into scalable, automated, and user-friendly platform services is at the heart of your work. 

The team 

You’ll be joining the BiGov team—BI & Governance—which is part of ART Data & Analytics within Technical Platforms. BiGov is a platform team that ensures data within Alliander is manageable, discoverable, and reliably available. To this end, the team provides governance and BI services within the Alliander DataCloud and supports data product teams in applying them. 

The users of these services are diverse. They include data product teams, data owners, data stewards, business and IT teams, and other platform teams within Alliander. As a result, you won’t be working in a technical silo, but rather at the intersection of platform, data, governance, and users. 

Key technologies within this landscape include Atlan, Power BI, and the Alliander DataCloud. Atlan is used for purposes such as data cataloging, metadata management, data lineage, governance, and the registration of data products. 

This is what you will do 

As a Senior Data Governance Engineer, you will work on designing, developing, and further refining the technical infrastructure for data governance within the Alliander DataCloud. 

A key principle in this regard is self-service. Governance should not depend on manual actions by the BiGov team, but should, as much as possible, become part of the platform’s technical architecture. This means standardizing, automating, and integrating governance as much as possible into the way teams publish and use data. 

Specifically, your responsibilities will include, among other things: 

• designing and implementing technical solutions for data governance, metadata management, and data cataloging; 

• further develop and integrate Atlan into the DataCloud landscape; 

• automating governance processes so that teams can work on a self-service basis as much as possible; 

• developing scripts, API integrations, and Infrastructure-as-Code for platform and governance functionality; 

• Automating tasks such as setting up workspaces and domains, processing requests, and granting permissions.  

• integrating governance functionality with other components of the data landscape, such as Snowflake, AWS, Power BI, ServiceNow, and the Alliander DataCloud; 

• ensure that metadata, lineage, ownership, and data quality are made technically visible and usable; 

• improving the reliability, security, manageability, and scalability of the solutions; 

• analyzing complex technical issues and translating them into concrete solutions; 

The scope of your role 

We are looking for a senior professional who takes an end-to-end view of the governance platform. You will oversee how architecture, the cloud, data, security, authorization, metadata, automation, and user processes influence one another. In doing so, you will make technical decisions independently and be able to clearly explain why a particular solution is the best choice in the long term. 

In doing so, you don’t just consider what’s technically possible. You also take into account factors such as security, compliance, manageability, continuity, scalability, and costs. At the senior level, we also expect you to clearly articulate alternatives and their implications and to help others make better technical decisions. In addition, you serve as a technical sparring partner for the Product Owner, Solution Architect, and other engineers.  

What do you bring? 

For this role, we are looking for an experienced engineer who combines technical expertise with a broad perspective and strong advisory skills. 

You have extensive experience with several of the following topics: 

• data governance and metadata management; 

• data catalog platforms, preferably Atlan or similar tools; 

• AWS; 

• Snowflake; 

• Power BI; 

• Infrastructure-as-Code; 

• Python; 

• APIs and system integrations; 

• CI/CD and automation; 

• cloud security, IAM, and authorization; 

• Solution and platform architecture. 

In addition, we expect you to: 

• can independently structure and solve complex problems; 

• looks beyond the immediate technical question; 

• align technical decisions with organizational and user interests; 

• communicates clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders; 

• actively makes proposals and dares to suggest a well-reasoned preferred course of action; 

• values quality and develops solutions that remain manageable over the long term; 

• actively shares knowledge and helps colleagues improve their expertise.