Lead Data Architect

J.Jill is a national lifestyle brand that provides apparel, footwear and accessories designed to help its customers move through a full life with ease. The brand represents an easy, thoughtful, and inspired style that celebrates the totality of all women and designs its products with its core brand ethos in mind: keep it simple and make it matter. J. Jill offers a high touch customer experience through over 200 stores nationwide and a robust ecommerce platform. J.Jill is headquartered outside Boston.

Advancing data analytics and master data management (MDM) capabilities are at the core of J. Jill’s strategic vision to augment business decision-making by drawing meaningful insights from its data assets. J. Jill has recently implemented a customer data platform to support vital business operations and enrich customer data to understand the company’s performance, opportunities, and the impact of our initiatives on customer behavior. J. Jill further plans to strengthen data architecture, analytics, and MDM practices to harness the full value of its data assets.

This pivotal role will be directly reporting to the Director of Enterprise Architecture, Integration & MDM and crucial to ensuring data quality accuracy, security, and compliance of J. Jill’s data.

This role will be responsible for cultivating a culture of data stewardship and ownership across the enterprise, which will involve working with the stakeholders to gather requirements, and design and implement standardized data governance policies and procedures aimed at supporting data management and compliance initiatives.

Data Governance

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams such as data engineers, architects, technology leads, business analysts, and other cross-functional stakeholders to establish data quality standards, policies, procedures, data ownership, access control, and data definitions.
• Establish trust and relationships with stakeholders while defining data governance requirements, ensuring alignment with business goals.
• Develop and maintain a centralized metadata catalog, and dictionary to document data assets, schemas, and lineage of data being managed by J. Jill and third-party applications.
• Define data access policies and classify assets based on sensitivity, confidentiality, and regulatory requirements to ensure compliance with privacy regulations such as CCPA, and GDPR.
• Implement data security, encryption, and access controls to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or disclosure.
• Coordinate with legal and compliance teams on the proper classification of Data and its retention periods
• Ensure compliance with relevant data protection regulations and industry standards.
• Coordinate with the compliance team to ensure that the date in 3rd party applications is being maintained within our policies.
• Lead effort to cleanse data and maintain accuracy by implementing quality control guidelines and reconciliation process.

Data Architecture and Strategy

• Work closely with business and IT teams to participate in the development of an overall Data analytics and AI strategy aligned with the business goals.
• Lead data architecture, data integration design, and data migration projects.
• Lead strategy to consolidate customer, product, inventory, and transactional data from different data on-prem and cloud data sources.
• Architect roadmap expansion of MDM, data analytics landscape.

Data Quality Management

• Develop and implement data quality metrics, monitoring, quality assessments, and audit processes.
• Create reports and reconciliation processes on data quality and work with the business to improve data quality iteratively.
• Proactively identify data quality issues and work with relevant teams to resolve them.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure that business intelligence is performed through consistent data sources and calculations.

Data Lifecycle Management

• Coordinate with Architects and Development teams to assist with managing data lifecycle processes, including data creation, maintenance, archival, and deletion.
• Ensure data is appropriately classified and protected based on its sensitivity and value.
• Coordinate closely with QA teams for non-production data refreshes and strategies
• Work on eliminating duplicate data in the current state and prevent the elimination of unneeded duplication of data in the future. 

• Strategic thinker capable of assessing business goals and translating them into a data architecture roadmap.
• Proficient in data analytics, data quality management, governance, life cycle management, integration, and modeling concepts.
• Ability to analyze and interpret data to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies.
• Strong communication skills to collaborate with cross-functional teams, explain complex data concepts to non-technical stakeholders, and facilitate data-related discussions.
• Effective problem-solving skills to address data quality issues, data integration challenges, and data governance concerns.
• Meticulous attention to detail to ensure data accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
• Understanding of data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and compliance requirements.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment and build positive relationships with stakeholders at all levels.
• Flexibility to adapt to evolving data management practices, technologies, and business requirements.
• Ability to work in a dynamic and ambiguous environment.
• Awareness of ethical considerations related to data stewardship, including data privacy, confidentiality, and security.
• Strong understanding of data governance frameworks, principles, and best practices.

Academic Qualifications and Experience

• A bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, data management, statistics, mathematics, or a related field.
• Prior experience working in a customer data platform (CDP), and MDM platform such as Oracle, Epsilon, Informatica, Reltio, Prosifee etc.
• Previous experience in data management, governance, analysis, or related fields.
• 10+ years of experience working as a data architect, data engineer, data steward, or similar positions.
• 5+ years of experience with the data lake, Lambda architecture, and data architecture practice.
• 5+ years of experience working in data modeling, SQL DBMS, and related tools.
• 5+ years of experience in data governance and data quality management.
• Experience working with data management tools, data profiling tools, data quality tools, and data integration tools.
• Experience working with ERP products such as Oracle, Manhattan, SAP etc.
• Experience working with ECOM platforms like HCL, Salesforce, Adobe, Shopify ,SAP etc.  
• Certifications in Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP), Certified Information Management Professional (CIMP), or certifications in data governance or data quality management are preferred.
• Experience in multi-channel retail, especially apparel or fashion, is a plus.

At J.Jill, we believe our associates should be seen, valued, and celebrated. We support the advancement of our associates by harnessing their unique contributions to grow and improve, and our success is guided by a culture that values keeping it simple and making it matter. J.Jill is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing an inclusive and professional workplace free from discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at J.Jill are based solely upon business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy and pregnancy related conditions, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, sexual orientation, sexual and reproductive health decisions, age, marital status, disability, genetic information, military or veteran status or any other legally protected status.  J.Jill provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals, in accordance with applicable laws.  If you need to inquire about an accommodation to assist with completing the application process, please email Talent.Acquisition@jjill.com