Principal Data Owner - US Power Markets

Wood Mackenzie is the global leader in analytics, insights and proprietary data across the entire energy and natural resources landscape.

For over 50 years our work has guided the decisions of the world’s most influential energy producers, utilities companies, financial institutions and governments.

Now, with the world’s energy system more complex and interconnected than ever before, sector-specific views are no longer enough. That’s why we’ve redefined what’s possible with Intelligence Connected.

By fusing our unparalleled proprietary data with the sharpest analytical minds, all supercharged by Synoptic AI, we deliver a clear, interconnected view of the entire value chain. Our trusted team of 2,700 experts across 30 countries breaks siloes and connects industries, markets and regions across the globe.

This empowers our customers to identify risk sooner, spot opportunities faster and recalibrate strategy with confidence – whether planning days, weeks, months or decades ahead.

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• Inclusive – we succeed together
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• Customer committed – we put customers at the heart of our decisions
• Future Focused – we accelerate change
• Curious – we turn knowledge into action

About the role

Wood Mackenzie is investing in a unified data platform to support our analyst and commercial teams across Power, Gas, and Oil. As part of that investment, we are building out a dedicated data ownership function — a team of people who are unambiguously accountable for the quality, meaning, and fitness-for-purpose of our most critical data assets.

The Principal Data Owner for Power Markets is the first hire into this function, and the work you step into is live and consequential. Our Power Market Intelligence team delivers daily fundamental and price forecasts across all seven North American ISOs, supporting more than 100 customer interactions every day with asset owners, traders, and energy retailers who make real market decisions in real time. The data you own is what reaches those analysts every morning. When it’s clean, normalized, and well-documented, they can focus on the work that matters. When it isn’t, everything downstream suffers.

This is a hands-on, individual contributor role. The scope will grow as the function matures, and you will help shape what that growth looks like. You bring the domain expertise and the accountability. We provide the platform, the investment, and the cross-functional relationships to make the work stick. We’ll measure success by both internal and external impact. This is a role that sets the bar for what-good-looks-like for our internal teams and should be recognized by our customers as an SME on power market data too.

What you will own

You are the authoritative voice on what our Power market data means and whether it is good enough to use. Concretely, that means:

• Being the single point of contact when data quality issues arise — analysts, engineers, and commercial teams should be able to reach you and get a definitive answer on what a dataset means, where it comes from, and whether something has gone wrong.
• Owning the data quality bar for the Power lane of our data platform. You will define what “good enough” looks like at each stage of the data pipeline and hold that standard over time, iterating as our data and models improve.
• Working closely with analytics engineering to validate that data transformations correctly reflect the business logic of Power market data, and documenting that logic in a way that can be shared and maintained.
• Mapping and cataloguing the data assets you own — understanding what sources we ingest, what transformations are applied, and what downstream use cases depend on them.
• Writing and maintaining data catalog documentation so that assets are well-described, discoverable, and useful to analysts and internal tooling.
• Bridging the gap between engineering teams and research and analyst teams — translating between technical and domain language, and ensuring that when something breaks, ownership is clear and resolution is fast.
• You will work across a globally distributed team that including a data operations team that runs overnight pipeline monitoring and hands clean data to the US analysts every morning. You speak both languages fluently. That means you can sit in a technical conversation with engineers and translate it into something analysts trust, and vice versa. When something breaks, ownership is clear and resolution is fast because you made sure it would be.

What we are looking for

• Deep knowledge of North American Power markets — you should be able to look at a dataset from a US ISO and know immediately what it represents, how it is typically used, and what a data quality issue would look like. Experience across multiple ISOs (e.g. ERCOT, CAISO, MISO, PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE, SPP) is strongly preferred.
• Technical proficiency in SQL and Python at a working level — you do not need to be a data engineer, but you need to be able to understand what a data pipeline is doing and write or debug queries to investigate an issue.
• A track record of owning data assets end to end — not just analysing data, but being accountable for its quality, provenance, and documentation in a production environment.
• Experience working at the boundary between research or domain expertise and engineering — you are comfortable in both worlds and can hold your own in a technical conversation while also being the person analysts trust to understand the data they depend on.
• A bias toward action and ownership. We need someone who finds ambiguity unacceptable and naturally moves to resolve it.
• You are energized by building, not just operating. This is the first hire into a new capability. If the idea of helping establish processes, ways of working, and standards from the ground up appeals to you, this role was designed for someone like you.

What this role is not

• This is not a management role. You will not have direct reports on day one and are not expected to build a team immediately. You are expected to be in the weeds.
• This is not a pure analytics role. You will need to engage with data pipeline infrastructure — not build it, but understand and influence it.
• This is not a finished function. You are the first hire into a capability we are actively building, and the scope will grow over time.

Why this role matters

The energy transition is reshaping risk across every North American power market. Demand growth is accelerating, price spreads are widening, and the customers we serve need reliable, precise intelligence to navigate it. Our Power Market Intelligence analysts are in those conversations every day, and the data you own is what makes their work possible.

When you get this right, you see it. The analyst team starts their day with clean, trusted data. Questions that used to take hours to resolve take minutes. Institutional knowledge stops walking out the door with every departure. This role is the foundation that everything else is built on, and the people around you will know it.

The salary range for this position is $150,000- $160,000 USD, which represents base pay only and does not include short-term incentive compensation. When determining base pay, as part of a final compensation package, we consider several factors such as location, experience, qualifications, and training.

Equal Opportunities

We are an equal opportunities employer. This means we are committed to recruiting the best people regardless of their race, colour, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. You can find out more about your rights under the law at www.eeoc.gov 

If you are applying for a role and have a physical or mental disability, we will support you with your application or through the hiring process.