[Hiring] Head of Data Governance & Enterprise Context Eng @Atlassian

Role Description

Data is a big deal at Atlassian. We ingest billions of events each month into our analytical platforms, and dozens of teams across the company depend on that data to run the business. As AI systems increasingly consume our data alongside our teams, the standard has risen: data must be clearly described, accurately classified, explicitly owned, and demonstrably trustworthy before it can be put to use.

Atlassian is looking for an Engineering Leader to join the Data Engineering team and own data governance and the enterprise context that makes our data trusted and AI-ready.

• Own the enterprise data governance operating model — domain ownership, decision rights, the governance council, and the steward network.
• Set policy for classification, access, retention, and acceptable use with Privacy, Legal, Security, and Compliance.
• Run data quality as a product.
• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for our data catalog, metadata, and lineage platform.
• Build the enterprise context that connects business entities to their ownership, lineage, and quality signals.
• Shift governance left into data contracts, automated classification at ingest, and policy-as-code.
• Define AI readiness as a certifiable state that continuously gates what data our models and agents can use.
• Drive adoption across a federated organization.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform, or data management, with a focus on data strategy, architecture, governance, and platform buildout.
• 8+ years of experience leading data engineering teams, including leading senior and principal-level architects.
• Demonstrated experience standing up or scaling an enterprise data catalog or metadata platform — DataHub, Unity Catalog, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience owning a data governance operating model end to end: policy, domain ownership, stewardship, classification, data quality, and controls.
• Experience with a data-as-a-product or data contracts operating model.
• Experience building a semantic layer, ontology, or knowledge graph intended for machine consumption.
• Experience across both corporate data domains (Finance, People, GTM) and customer or product data.
• Working fluency in privacy and regulatory requirements — GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, SOX, SOC 2.
• Technical depth to lead a design review with a principal engineer: strong SQL, modern lakehouse platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery).
• Experience implementing DevOps best practices within the data platform.
• Experience building services and RESTful APIs, and exposing metadata or platform capability programmatically.
• Demonstrated experience developing influential relationships and trust with senior leaders across different departments.
• Prior experience partnering with Analytics, Data Science, Engineering, Security, Privacy, Legal and Product Management teams.
• A graduate degree in Computer Science, Information Management or a similar subject area.

Requirements

• Experience applying LLMs to governance work itself — metadata and description generation, classification, entity resolution, or data quality anomaly triage.
• Experience working for SaaS companies, including multi-tenant customer data, tenant isolation, and data residency at scale.
• Experience with responsible AI programs or AI governance frameworks such as the NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, or the EU AI Act.
• DAMA-DMBOK grounding, CDMP, or a privacy certification such as CIPP or CIPT.
• Committed code to open source projects.

Benefits

• Atlassian offers a wide range of perks and benefits designed to support you, your family, and to help you engage with your local community.
• Health and wellbeing resources.
• Paid volunteer days.
• Visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits for more information.