Torchora
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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for a Governance Engineer

💰 $115,000 - $170,000

EngineeringCloudData GovernanceSecurityComplianceDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

Are you a builder who is passionate about creating secure, compliant, and efficient systems at scale? We're looking for a motivated Governance Engineer to join our dynamic platform team. In this pivotal role, you will be the architect and implementer of the automated policies and controls that govern our cloud infrastructure and data assets. You will blend software engineering principles with deep knowledge of security, compliance, and cloud technologies to create "guardrails" that empower our development teams to innovate quickly and safely. This isn't about saying "no"; it's about building the automated systems that say "yes, securely." If you excel at turning governance requirements into code and want to make a significant impact on our organization's posture, we want to hear from you.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Cloud Engineer / DevOps Engineer
  • Data Engineer with a focus on quality and security
  • Security Analyst / Security Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior or Lead Governance Engineer
  • Cloud Security Architect / Data Governance Architect
  • Manager, Cloud Governance or Platform Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Senior Cloud Security Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, develop, and maintain robust and scalable Policy-as-Code (PaC) using frameworks like Open Policy Agent (OPA), Sentinel, or native cloud controls to enforce security, compliance, and operational standards.
  • Engineer and automate preventative and detective guardrails for our multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) to ensure all provisioned resources adhere to organizational policies.
  • Develop and manage a centralized Identity and Access Management (IAM) governance framework, implementing principles of least privilege and automating access reviews and permission lifecycle management.
  • Build and operate automated solutions for cloud security posture management (CSPM) to continuously monitor for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance drifts.
  • Implement and automate cost governance strategies (FinOps), including tagging enforcement, budget alerting, and the identification of idle or underutilized resources to optimize cloud spend.
  • Collaborate with security, legal, and compliance teams to translate complex regulatory requirements (such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA) into technical, automatable controls.
  • Create and maintain CI/CD pipelines for the deployment and testing of governance policies and infrastructure-as-code, ensuring changes are validated before reaching production.
  • Develop custom scripts and automation tooling (primarily in Python or Go) to streamline governance workflows, reporting, and remediation of policy violations.
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  • Act as a subject matter expert on cloud and data governance, providing guidance and consultative support to engineering teams on best practices for secure and compliant architecture.
  • Drive the implementation and integration of a data cataloging and data lineage solution to improve data discovery, trustworthiness, and lifecycle management.
  • Engineer automated data quality checks and monitoring systems to ensure the reliability and integrity of critical data assets across the organization.
  • Manage and configure enterprise governance tooling across cloud, data, and security domains, ensuring their effective operation and integration into our ecosystem.
  • Develop a comprehensive tagging and metadata enforcement strategy for all cloud resources and data assets to enable effective cost allocation, security monitoring, and asset management.
  • Build dashboards and reporting mechanisms to provide leadership and stakeholders with clear visibility into the organization's compliance posture, security risks, and governance metrics.
  • Participate in the architecture and security review process for new services and applications, ensuring governance principles are embedded from the initial design phase.
  • Automate evidence collection for internal and external audits, significantly reducing the manual effort required to demonstrate compliance.
  • Establish and operate a governance-as-a-service model, providing self-service tools and standardized modules that empower developers to build compliant infrastructure.
  • Lead incident response activities related to governance and compliance violations, conducting root cause analysis and implementing corrective and preventative measures.
  • Research, evaluate, and prototype emerging governance technologies and frameworks to continuously improve the organization's automation and control capabilities.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for all governance processes, policies, and automated systems to serve as a resource for all technical teams.
  • Mentor junior engineers and colleagues on governance best practices, coding standards, and automation techniques.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to investigate governance-related inquiries.
  • Contribute to the organization's overall data and cloud strategy and help define the technology roadmap.
  • Collaborate with various business units to translate their data protection and usage needs into concrete engineering requirements.
  • Participate actively in sprint planning, retrospectives, and other agile ceremonies within the platform engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Deep expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including their core compute, storage, networking, and IAM services.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficient in writing, testing, and deploying infrastructure using Terraform or CloudFormation.
  • Policy as Code (PaC): Hands-on experience with Open Policy Agent (OPA)/Rego, AWS Config, Azure Policy, or HashiCorp Sentinel.
  • Scripting & Programming: Strong scripting skills in Python, Go, or PowerShell for automation, API integration, and tool development.
  • CI/CD & DevOps: Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or GitHub Actions.
  • Identity & Access Management (IAM): Thorough understanding of IAM policies, roles, service principals, and federation in a cloud context.
  • Containerization: Familiarity with Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE).
  • Data Governance Tools: Experience with or knowledge of data catalog, lineage, or quality tools (e.g., Collibra, Alation, Monte Carlo, Apache Atlas).
  • Security Frameworks: Knowledge of common security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, GDPR, and CCPA.
  • Monitoring & Logging: Experience with observability platforms like Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, or Grafana to monitor for compliance and security events.

Soft Skills

  • Problem-Solving: Excellent analytical and critical thinking skills to dissect complex requirements and engineer elegant solutions.
  • Communication: Ability to clearly and concisely communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Collaboration: A strong team-player mindset with a proven ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, security, and business teams.
  • Attention to Detail: Meticulous approach to writing code, configuring policies, and documenting processes.
  • Pragmatism: The ability to balance a long-term strategic vision with the need to deliver incremental, pragmatic value.
  • Ownership Mentality: A proactive attitude and a sense of ownership for the quality and reliability of the governance platform.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent demonstrated practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's Degree in a relevant field.
  • Relevant industry certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Security - Specialty, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Information Systems
  • Cybersecurity
  • Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3-7 years in a related role such as Cloud Engineering, DevOps, SRE, or Security Engineering.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrable experience building and managing governance controls in a large-scale, public cloud environment.
  • Prior experience working in a highly regulated industry (e.g., FinTech, Healthcare).
  • A portfolio of scripts, IaC/PaC code, or projects (e.g., a public GitHub profile) is highly desirable.
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