Senior Data & AI Governance Consultant

Location: UK (hybrid) with travel to client sites
Contract: Permanent, full-time
Reports to: Head of Data Management
Security clearance: Minimum SC (active)
Salary: 85,000-95,000

Role overview

This role supports UK Central Government and Defence clients in building strong data governance foundations and adopting responsible, well-assured AI. The successful candidate will work under broad direction to deliver client engagements, advise on good practice, and produce practical outputs such as policies, standards, operating models, and evaluation frameworks that improve data quality, model reliability, risk management, and compliance.

What you’ll do

Delivery and client engagement

• Deliver data governance workstreams covering policies and standards, roles and RACI, stewardship models, issue management, and data quality measurement and remediation.

• Design and support metadata and cataloguing activities, including business glossaries, lineage capture, classification, and sensitivity labels, using client-standard platforms.

• Contribute to AI assurance across the lifecycle, including training data readiness, model selection support, test and evaluation, operational governance, monitoring, drift detection, and re-evaluation.

• Author clear governance artefacts such as frameworks, operating procedures, evaluation plans, model cards, datasheets, risk assessments, and assurance reports.

• Run workshops and stakeholder interviews, translating requirements into actionable designs and delivery backlogs.

• Support benefits tracking, including data quality uplift, lineage coverage, model performance stability, and incident reduction.

Methods, tools and assurance

• Apply and tailor governance and AI assurance playbooks, including policy templates, data quality standards, risk and control libraries, and evaluation checklists.

• Configure or enable client tools such as governance, MLOps, and reporting platforms for lineage, labels, model registry, monitoring, and governance.

• Contribute to assurance reviews and quality gates, maintaining structured evidence for audits and approvals.

Consulting and collaboration

• Work in multi-disciplinary teams with data architects, platform engineers, and security colleagues, while managing day-to-day stakeholder communication.

• Contribute to proposals, estimates, slide decks, and demos for pre-sales and discovery.

• Coach junior consultants and share knowledge through internal communities of practice.

What you’ll bring

Essential

• Proven experience in data governance delivery, including policy and standards, stewardship models, RACI, decision forums, data quality, metadata and catalogue adoption, and privacy/protection in data handling.

• Practical understanding of AI assurance, including training data preparation and validation, model selection considerations, testing and evaluation, and in-life governance such as monitoring and drift detection.

• Strong consulting fundamentals: structured problem-solving, facilitation, documentation, and stakeholder communication.

• Ability to work under general direction, plan your own work, and enable others.

• Excellent written and spoken English.

• Minimum SC clearance and willingness to travel to UK client sites.

Desirable

• Experience in UK Central Government, Defence, or regulated/public sector environments.

• Familiarity with frameworks and standards such as DAMA-DMBOK, NIST AI RMF 1.0, ISO/IEC 23894, ISO/IEC 27001, and UK GDPR / DPA 2018.

• Hands-on exposure to governance, MLOps, and analytics platforms.

• Exposure to model registry, approval workflows, monitoring, incidents and rollbacks, and risk/control libraries.

• Awareness of secure development and deployment constraints such as air-gapped networks and protective monitoring.