Kyowa Kirin is a global specialty pharmaceutical company backed by more than 70 years of breakthrough life science innovation, dedicated to discovering and advancing treatments for diseases in which unmet need is greatest. Based in Japan with worldwide operations, we work across the continuum from drug discovery to commercialization, guided by our commitment to patients and their families.
Our research teams, located in California and around the world, are focused on developing the next generation of antibody, cell, and gene therapies, with particular emphasis on bone and mineral disorders, hemato-oncology, and rare diseases. We accelerate development through collaborations with industry, academia, patients, and healthcare providers, and since 2018 we have introduced four new therapies serving patients with progressive illnesses often in need of new therapeutic alternatives.
Our culture is grounded in our values: Commitment to Life, Integrity, Innovation, and Teamwork/Wa, and brought to life through the Kabegoe Principles, which define the behaviors and actions that guide how we work together to deliver meaningful impact for patients.
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made and mindful of the countless individuals still waiting for their own breakthroughs. A commitment to making people smile unites our efforts. Learn more at www.kkna.kyowakirin.com.
Job Summary:
Kyowa Kirin, North America is actively seeking an Associate Director, Data Governance for our Enterprise Architecture & Data Office within Commercial Operations. This is a newly created governance leadership role accountable for establishing and running KKNA’s enterprise data governance program - the data catalog and business glossary, the data access governance model, the data quality management capability, and the governance policies and SOPs that support them - across the enterprise data lake and connected source systems. The role spans Commercial Operations, Sales & Marketing, Medical Affairs, Market Access, and Patient Services, across the full KKNA portfolio.
The Associate Director serves as the operational bridge between the data platform team and the business functions that consume data - ensuring that data assets are findable, documented, trusted, and accessible to the correct people through defined, repeatable processes. Technical build, engineering, and provisioning activity remains with the Data Platform, Data Architecture, and IT teams; this role defines the standards those teams implement against and holds the organization accountable to them. The Associate Director will help build the function from the ground up: including the catalog, access model, governance committee operations, SOPs, and the enablement experience for every data consumer in the organization.
The role partners closely with Legal, Privacy, and Compliance and operates within the boundaries those functions set, but does not author or own policies that belong to them. Success depends primarily on influence, facilitation, documentation discipline, and cross-functional credibility, supported by enough working familiarity with data platforms and data structures to engage technical partners with confidence.
Essential Functions:
Data Access Governance
- Serve as the first point of contact for all data access requests - triage, classify by data sensitivity, route to the appropriate Domain Data Owner, and track through technical provisioning performed by the Data Platform team.
- Maintain and publish data access request SOPs so that compliance and legal review is defined at the policy level - not renegotiated on a per-project basis.
- Administer a tiered access model across all enterprise data lake environments - covering data scientists, analysts, business users, and external partners.
- Conduct quarterly access audits to identify and coordinate deprovisioning of stale or excess access.
- Maintain a complete, documented access log across all data lake workspaces, with rationale for each grant and defined expiration dates.
Data Governance Operations
- Draft, maintain, and publish enterprise data governance SOPs covering access requests, patient data boundary rules, new data source onboarding, data quality escalation, and incident response.
- Own the operational cadence of the Data Management Committee (DMC) - agendas, minutes, action tracking, and the enterprise governance policy register - and prepare materials and recommendations for quarterly DMC sessions.
- Document end-to-end data lineage for critical datasets, from source system through ingestion to downstream reporting and analytics, in partnership with the technical owners of each layer.
- Serve as a senior point of escalation for data governance disputes, access conflicts, and policy interpretations across the commercial, medical, market access, and patient services functions.
- Define and maintain the Domain Data Owner model - assignments, accountabilities, and operating expectations - so that each business function is accountable for the quality and definition of the data it originates.
New Data Source Onboarding
- Oversee the compliant acquisition, use, and stewardship of data assets by coordinating with legal, procurement, and business stakeholders to ensure contractual, privacy, and data-use requirements are met.
- Lead the intake and assessment process for all new data sources entering the enterprise data lake - including business justification, compliance and privacy review, Domain Data Owner assignment, and DMC notification - with technical assessment provided by the Data Platform and Data Architecture teams.
- Ensure every new source has a documented owner, defined refresh SLA, data quality baseline, and catalog entry before promotion to production and downstream consumption.
- Partner with Data Platform Vendor, IT, and external vendors to ensure appropriate controls and quality standards are applied from data ingestion through downstream consumption.
Data Catalog & Metadata Management
- Own and maintain KKNA’s enterprise data catalog - the authoritative directory of all data assets in the Enterprise data lake, legacy Synapse platform, and connected source systems, including business descriptions, data owners, refresh frequency, granularity, and access tier.
- Document business-friendly metadata for all active datasets and enforce consistent metadata standards across the organization.
- Build and maintain the enterprise business glossary - canonical definitions for key metrics that currently vary by function (patient, prescriber, market share, conversion, persistence, adherence etc ) - and drive cross-functional alignment and formal approval of those definitions.
- Partner with the Data Platform and Data Architecture teams to rationalize the schema catalog - identifying and coordinating the archiving of inactive or redundant schemas from completed projects.
- Coordinate glossary and data model alignment with the canonical data model initiative and with downstream analytics and reporting teams.
Data Quality & Vendor SLA Management
- Establish and maintain a data quality scorecard for priority datasets - specialty pharmacy and distributor feeds, claims, payer policy, tokenized data, and CRM data - tracking accuracy, completeness, and timeliness.
- Own the data quality issue intake process: receive reports from business users, triage by severity (P1/P2/P3), route to the appropriate technical owner, and track through resolution.
- Monitor critical vendor data delivery SLAs and escalate failures through defined channels; ensure vendor accountability and corrective action where SLAs are breached.
- Publish a quarterly data quality scorecard to the Data Management Committee and all Domain Data Owners.
- Lead P1 incident retrospectives - documenting root causes, remediation actions, and process changes to prevent recurrence.
Cross-Functional Partnership & User Enablement
- Act as the primary liaison between the commercial, medical, market access, and patient services business teams and the Data Platform / IT function - translating data requirements, quality expectations, and governance decisions into clear, actionable outcomes.
- Develop and maintain function-specific data consumer guides - plain-language references to what data each team can access, how to request more, and who to contact.
- Run new-user onboarding for all enterprise data lake access - ensuring users understand the catalog, available data assets, access tiers, and governance expectations before access is provisioned.
- Host monthly data office hours - open sessions for business stakeholders to bring data questions, access requests, quality feedback, or glossary input.
- Define, track, and report enterprise data governance metrics - including data quality performance, issue resolution time, access request cycle time, catalog coverage, and adoption of governed definitions.
- Champion a data-first mindset across the commercial organization, balancing accessibility and innovation with governance, accountability, and measurable business value.
- Demonstrated ability to think creatively and strategically, to build alliances cross-functionally, and the flexibility to work in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.
Job Requirements:
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (Data Science, Business Analytics, Information Systems, Life Sciences, or equivalent) required; Master’s degree preferred.
- CDMP (Certified Data Management Professional), DCAM, DAMA, or equivalent data governance certification preferred.
Experience
- 8-10+ years of experience in data management, data governance, data catalog, or data stewardship, with a significant portion spent in the pharmaceutical, biotech, or life sciences industry.
- Experience supporting or operating a data governance committee, data council, or cross-functional steering group - including charter design, agenda facilitation, decision documentation, and action tracking.
- Demonstrated experience building or leading an enterprise data governance program from an early stage - including framework design, policy and SOP authorship, data ownership models, and driving adoption across functions outside of direct reporting authority.
- Demonstrated experience maintaining a data catalog or metadata management platform (Collibra, Alation, Informatica, Microsoft Purview, Unity Catalog, or equivalent).
- Experience designing and implementing data access governance processes - including role-based access models, tiered access frameworks, and periodic access audit procedures - in partnership with the technical teams responsible for provisioning.
- Demonstrated experience defining canonical business metric definitions and reconciling conflicting definitions across commercial and non-commercial stakeholders.
- Experience establishing data quality management practices - scorecards, thresholds, severity-based issue triage, and remediation tracking - for third-party and internally generated data assets.
- Deep understanding of pharmaceutical data domains
- Knowledge of HIPAA, PII, PHI data handling requirements, and pharmaceutical industry data privacy and compliance standards, with demonstrated experience establishing durable data boundary rules in partnership with Legal, Privacy, and Compliance.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate across both technical and business audiences - translating data infrastructure and governance decisions into plain-language guidance that business stakeholders can act on.
- Strong written communication skills - demonstrated ability to produce SOPs, data governance policies, data dictionaries, and business-facing reference documents.
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional change initiatives and drive results through influence, stakeholder relationships, and clear communication rather than direct authority.
Technical Skills
The following familiarity is preferred to support effective partnership with the Data Platform, Data Architecture, and Business teams:
- Working familiarity with cloud data lake or data warehouse environments (Azure Databricks, Snowflake, Azure Synapse, or equivalent) sufficient to navigate the environment and participate credibly in technical discussions.
- Working SQL proficiency sufficient to independently review data structures, validate definitions, and assess data quality issues before routing them to a technical owner.
- Conceptual understanding of master data management and entity resolution - matching, de-duplication, survivorship, and hierarchy management - as applied to HCP, HCO, and patient data domains.
- Conceptual understanding of row-level and column-level security, role-based access control and data classification models sufficient to define access tiers that technical teams can implement.
- Familiarity with data integration concepts and tooling (Azure Data Factory, Informatica, or equivalent) sufficient to assess ingestion design against governance, documentation, and quality standards.
- Familiarity with business intelligence and reporting tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Qlik for governance reporting and data quality score carding.
- Familiarity with patient tokenization and de-identification approaches (Datavant or equivalent) and the governance implications of linking tokenized patient data to commercial datasets.
- Working familiarity with AI/ML governance concepts sufficient to partner with analytics, data science, and platform teams on governed model use cases, including feature governance and reusable feature definitions, model input lineage, model monitoring and drift awareness, responsible AI and human review expectations, and controls for PHI/PII, consent, bias, explainability, auditability, and governed use of next-best-action, next-best-customer, patient risk, churn, recommender, NLP insight extraction, and engagement propensity models.
Non-Technical Skills
The ability to organize, prioritize, meet deadlines, make decisions, and change the course of action quickly. Strong interpersonal and communication skills. A strong work ethic is required. Detail-oriented and excellent follow-through. Comfortable holding a firm position on governance standards while maintaining strong working relationships across functions. Has the ability to flex and deal with ambiguity in a dynamic, fast-paced, high-growth environment. Has a passion for personal learning and development to be able to grow with the company. Cultural sensitivity and ability to develop consensus within a multinational organization.
Physical Demands: Normal office environment with prolonged sitting and extensive computer work.
Working Conditions: Requires up to 10% domestic travel based on business needs
The anticipated salary for this position will be $166,700 to $215,700. The actual salary offered for this role at commencement of employment may vary based on several factors including but not limited to relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, education (including applicable licenses and certifications, job-based knowledge, location, and other business and organizational needs.
The listed salary is just one component of the overall compensation package. At Kyowa Kirin North America we provide a comprehensive range of benefits including:
- 401K with company match
- Annual Bonus Program (Sales Bonus for Sales Jobs)
- Generous PTO and Holiday Schedule which includes Summer and Winter Shut-Downs, Sick Days and, Volunteer Days
- Healthcare Benefits (Medical, Dental, Prescription Drugs and Vision)
- HSA & FSA Programs
- Well-Being and Work/Life Programs
- Life & Disability Insurance
- Concierge Services
- Long Term Incentive Program (subject to job level and performance)
- Pet Insurance
- Tuition Assistance
- Employee Referral Awards
The compensation and benefits information set forth in this posting applies to candidates hired in the United States. Candidates hired outside the United States will be eligible for compensation and benefits in accordance with their local market.
KKNA and all of its employees have an obligation to act in accordance with the law and with integrity in all our operations and interactions
It is the policy of Kyowa Kirin North America, Inc. to provide equal employment opportunity to all qualified persons without regard to race, religion, creed, color, pregnancy, sex, age, national origin, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation or affection preference or citizenship status or any other category protected by law.
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