Director, Data Strategy & Governance

Healthcare Realty is seeking a hands-on Director, Data Strategy & Governance to join our Data, AI & Innovation team at our Nashville corporate headquarters. This role owns Healthcare Realty's enterprise data lake on Microsoft Fabric in Azure, leads a small team of developers who build in it every day, and does development work alongside them. The data lake is the enterprise source of truth for an exciting three-year program of AI-accelerated applications and agentic AI solutions.
We offer a competitive compensation package, including an annual bonus opportunity and comprehensive benefits. To learn more about our benefits, visit www.healthcarerealty.com/careers/.
Healthcare Realty is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer, including Minorities, Women, Veterans, and Individuals with Disabilities.

Healthcare Realty is on a journey to deliver AI-accelerated applications and agentic AI solutions across the business. Every one of them depends on trusted, well-governed data. The data lake is that foundation: the single source of truth for property, tenant, lease, financial, and operational data, and the place where our applications and AI agents will find the information they need to do their work.

The initial data lake is established. It was built on Microsoft Fabric with a medallion (bronze, silver, gold) architecture by a third-party implementation partner and integrates our core property management, leasing, and financial systems. You will take over ownership of the platform from that partner, lead the knowledge transfer, and continue to build on it as business and AI needs grow.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will lead direct reports who do daily development work in the data lake, and you will do development work yourself: designing pipelines, writing transformations, modeling data, and reviewing code. You will also own data governance, including data quality, lineage, master data, and access controls, so that the data is trusted for financial reporting, executive decisions, and AI.

This role reports to the Vice President, Data, AI & Innovation, a seasoned executive leader who has built and led data and AI organizations at global enterprises and is committed to mentoring and developing the people on the team. This is a hybrid position, with four days per week in our Nashville, Tennessee headquarters and one day remote.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise data lake on Microsoft Fabric, including its architecture, pipelines, data models, environments, performance, capacity, cost, and day-to-day reliability.

• Lead the transition of platform ownership from our third-party implementation partner, including knowledge transfer, documentation, runbooks, and a clear plan for what the internal team owns and when.

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines and transformations across the bronze, silver, and gold layers using Fabric Data Factory, Dataflows Gen2, notebooks (PySpark and SQL), lakehouses, and warehouses.

• Write production code alongside the team and set the standard for code quality, testing, documentation, and peer review.

• Extend the data lake with new sources and data domains as business and AI needs grow, prioritizing the work with business stakeholders and technology leadership.

• Build and maintain the curated data models and Power BI semantic models that support financial reporting, executive dashboards, and internal applications.

• Prepare the data lake to serve AI-accelerated applications and agentic AI solutions, including governed, well-documented data products and reliable access patterns for applications and AI agents.

• Establish DevOps practices for the platform, including source control, deployment pipelines across development, test, and production environments, release management, and monitoring.

• Own the data governance program, including data ownership and stewardship, business definitions, the data catalog, and certified metrics.

• Define and enforce data quality rules, monitoring, and issue resolution so that data is trusted for financial, operational, and AI use.

• Maintain end-to-end lineage from source systems to reports and applications using Microsoft Purview or similar tools.

• Manage role-based access, row-level security, and controls for sensitive and SOX-relevant financial data in partnership with Security and Internal Audit.

• Lead master data management for core business entities such as properties, tenants, leases, and health systems.

• Lead, coach, and develop two direct reports, setting clear priorities, assigning and reviewing work, and supporting their professional growth.

• Partner with Finance, Accounting, Asset Management, Leasing, Investments, and application development teams to understand their needs and translate them into data solutions.

• Manage relationships with platform vendors and implementation partners, and track platform capacity, consumption, and cost.

• Communicate progress, risks, dependencies, and decisions clearly to technology leadership and business stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field; equivalent professional experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.

• 8+ years of hands-on data engineering or data platform experience, including 2+ years leading or mentoring a team of engineers or developers.

• Hands-on experience building and supporting data solutions in Microsoft Fabric or Azure data services such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage, or Azure Databricks.

• Strong SQL and Python (including PySpark) skills, with a track record of writing production-quality code.

• Experience designing lakehouse or data warehouse architectures, including medallion architecture, dimensional modeling, and star schemas.

• Experience implementing data governance, data quality, lineage, metadata management, and access controls.

• Experience building Power BI semantic models and DAX measures.

• Experience with source control, CI/CD pipelines, and environment management for data platforms.

• Experience taking ownership of, stabilizing, and extending a platform built by another team or vendor.

• Ability to explain technical topics clearly to business and executive audiences.

• Strong ownership, organization, and follow-through.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience preparing data for AI and machine learning use cases, such as retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, or AI agents.

• Microsoft certifications such as Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) or Fabric Data Engineer Associate (DP-700).

• Experience with Microsoft Purview or another enterprise data catalog.

• Experience with master data management tools and practices.

• Experience in commercial real estate, REITs, or financial services, including property management and leasing systems.

• Experience supporting SOX controls or audited financial reporting in a public company.