Vice President, Data Governance

About the role

Syndio enables organizations to make sensitive AI assisted decisions, Trust is a key factor. Customers are increasingly rigorous about AI governance, data usage, and privacy reviews — they are trying, and frequently struggling, to navigate the implications. 

We have an opportunity to be thought leaders, to shape what is possible and in the process to accelerate deals and value. This role is designed to close the gap between customer needs, policy and product in order to deliver data governance as a first order value proposition. 

Why this role is exciting

Customer engagement

• Be the senior voice in customer AI reviews, security reviews, DPAs, and data processing negotiations — the person who unblocks the hardest accounts.
• Lead the conversation with empathy and curiosity. Understand what the customer is trying to protect, what business outcome they're solving for, and where their own internal politics sit. Map that to our policy, propose a better path when their ask doesn't fit, and bring them with us.
• Help customers become thought leaders inside their own organizations — give them the framing, language, and artifacts to win their own internal reviews and advocate for the approach we've landed together.
• Drive AAD opt-in as a core outcome: make the value exchange legible, design the consent experience so saying yes is the obvious path, and remove the friction keeping current opt-in suppressed.
• Partner with Sales, CX, and Legal on enablement: talk tracks, objection handling, canonical answers, live-fire playbooks for AI review calls. Raise the floor so every AE and CSM can carry the first 80% of these conversations.
• Own customer-facing governance artifacts — trust center content, model cards, audit/access narratives, questionnaire library.

Policy & thought leadership

• Own and land the Data Philosophy & Usage Framework — data classifications (including AAD), permitted/restricted/prohibited uses, the AI Governance Policy, retention, cross-tenant rules — and make each position defensible and crisp, grounded in what customers actually need.
• When a customer conversation surfaces a gap, close it — don't route around it. Update policy, update positioning, update enablement.
• Convert our posture into external thought leadership: published positions, conference talks (Compa, HR Tech, privacy/AI forums), whitepapers, analyst briefings. Make Syndio the reference point other vendors are measured against.
• Maintain the mapping between our controls and external frameworks (NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2, state privacy laws, EU pay transparency / EUTPD) and keep it current as regulation evolves.

Product alignment

• Carry the customer signal into the product process — in design reviews, PRD reviews, and architecture discussions — so what we commit to customers is actually fit-for-purpose in the components we're building.
• Translate policy into concrete product requirements: audit trails, privilege handling, discoverability, AI approval workflows, data lifecycle controls, Decision Graph logging semantics.
• Close the loop both directions: when a customer commitment is made, there is a product owner and a verification path. When product ships something new, policy, enablement, and customer messaging are updated in lockstep. No drift.

About you

• Sit in a customer conversation and change its shape — from checkbox exercise to a real discussion about what the customer is trying to solve — without giving away ground we shouldn't.
• Leave a customer better equipped to lead their own internal reviews and advocate for the approach inside their organization.
• Hear a customer objection and know in real time: is this a place we need to adjust our policy, adjust our product, or hold our ground and reframe?
• Write a defensible, plain-English policy position under pressure — and defend it to counsel, to a CISO, and to an analyst.
• Move the AAD opt-in needle — because the value exchange is clear, the consent path is clean, and customers trust what we'll do with the data.
• Read a PRD, spot the governance-reality gap, and get it fixed before it ships.
• Turn "we don't do that" and "we do this instead" into an industry position that draws customers toward us.
• Operate as a peer to Product, Engineering, Security, Legal, CX, and Sales. 
• Translate fluently between regulator language, customer-procurement language, and engineering language.
• Know the difference between what a customer is asking for and what they actually need, and have the empathy and authority to close that gap.

If successful, this role will:

• Double AAD opt-in. Move aggregated & anonymized data consent from customers — because customers understand the value exchange, trust the posture, and say yes with confidence. 
• Turn AI review from a blocker into a magnet. Shrink the time from "AI review requested" to "AI review cleared," and start winning deals because engaging with us on governance is easier and clearer than anyone else's — governance as a first-class commercial differentiator, not a tax.
• Equip our customers to lead. Send customers back into their own organizations able to articulate a defensible, modern posture on pay-decision AI — making their legal/security/exec reviews easier and making them advocates for the approach we've built together.
• Ship the right thing the first time. Because customer signal flows cleanly into policy and then into product, we meet customer needs with materially less rework — fewer bespoke commitments, fewer surprises in security review, fewer escapes where what we shipped doesn't match what we sold.