Senior Finance Data Governance Consultant – Contract

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Evaluate the current maturity of Finance data governance, including documentation, ownership, controls, and data management practices.

• Develop and implement a Finance Data Governance operating model that outlines roles, decision rights, forums, workflows, escalation paths, and operational cadences.

• Create governance standards, procedures, templates, decision logs, issue-management routines, and approval workflows.

• Compile an inventory of key Finance data domains, systems, tables, reports, interfaces, data products, calculations, mappings, and critical data elements.

• Document business definitions, ownership, stewardship, approved usage, security classification, refresh frequency, and downstream dependencies.

• Address conflicting definitions across Finance teams and prepare metadata for publication in the enterprise data catalog.

• Map data lineage through integration, transformation, consolidation, reporting, and analytical usage.

• Document business rules, transformation logic, mappings, allocations, eliminations, adjustments, currency translation, and reconciliation points.

• Identify manual transformations, uncontrolled spreadsheets, duplicated logic, ownership gaps, and lineage discrepancies.

• Establish Finance data quality standards, rules, thresholds, monitoring requirements, and acceptance criteria.

• Create inventories of data quality rules, assist with issue triage and root-cause analysis, and maintain auditable evidence.

• Oversee Finance master data, reference data, mappings, and hierarchies.

• Collaborate on hierarchy-management and Master Data Management initiatives, including requirements gathering, process design, testing, and impact assessment.

• Apply governance standards to priority Finance data products and assist with documentation for SAP financial and consolidation data.

• Document data flows and reconciliation requirements across SAP, consolidation/reporting platforms, Snowflake, Domo, planning tools, and downstream reports.

• Support governed enterprise context and semantic layers for reporting, analytics, and AI-enabled Finance applications.

• Facilitate workshops, prepare executive updates, develop training materials, and mentor data owners and stewards.

• Establish onboarding processes for new data domains and products.

• Maintain a prioritized governance backlog that includes owners, deliverables, dependencies, and completion criteria.

• Work independently to identify missing requirements and clarify ambiguities.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of eight years of experience in data governance, Finance data management, Finance transformation, financial systems, data quality, metadata management, or related consulting positions.

• Proven experience in establishing or significantly enhancing a data governance and data strategy capability within a complex enterprise environment.

• Strong knowledge of Finance processes, encompassing general ledger, management reporting, financial consolidation, planning, forecasting, closing, and reconciliation.

• Experience in documenting financial data definitions, business rules, mappings, hierarchies, lineage, controls, and data quality requirements.

• Experience collaborating with Finance, Accounting, FP&A, data engineering, business intelligence, security, and enterprise technology teams.

• Ability to differentiate business ownership and governance responsibilities from technical platform and engineering responsibilities.

• Excellent facilitation skills and the capability to drive decisions among stakeholders with varying priorities.

• Proven ability to create detailed, practical deliverables with limited existing documentation or structure.

• Strong written communication skills, enabling the production of both detailed working documentation and executive-level summaries.

• Experience in a consulting, transformation, or contractor role where measurable deliverables and knowledge transfer are essential.

• Ability to function independently in an ambiguous, fast-paced, greenfield environment.

• Preferred: experience with SAP S/4HANA Finance, cloud data platforms, analytics/reporting tools, data governance/catalog platforms, SQL, data profiling/reconciliation, dimensional modeling, semantic layers, hierarchies, modern data architectures, and environments sensitive to SOX controls or audits.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical insurance

• Dental insurance

• Vision insurance

• 12-month temporary assignment