Company Description

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond. 

Job Description

The Role

• Fastmarkets is, at its core, a data business. The prices, indices, and market intelligence we produce are relied upon by participants across global commodity, metals, forest products, agricultural and carbon markets to make investment/risk management decisions. The integrity, consistency, and trustworthiness of our data is not simply a compliance obligation; it is the foundation of our commercial proposition and the source of our competitive advantage. That makes Data Governance one of the most strategically important capabilities we can build.

  We are looking for a Data Governance Manager who thrives in a business that is genuinely on the move. Fastmarkets has made significant strides in its data capabilities and continues to invest ambitiously. This is an exciting place to be: a landscape full of high-impact opportunities where thoughtful, energetic governance work will make a visible and lasting difference.

  The Data Governance Manger will operate at the intersection of data strategy, technology, commercial operations, and regulatory compliance – working across every major function of the business. Strong stakeholder instincts, a bias for action, and the confidence to bring people with them will be as important as technical knowledge. Above all, this is a role for someone who measures success by real-world outcomes: better data, better decisions, and a business that resoundingly trusts its data.

  The approach that will yield the greatest results here will involve pragmatism and momentum. The ability to assess the current landscape, identify where governance can add the most value right now, and begin building – iteratively and collaboratively – will matter far more than arriving with a theoretically perfect framework. The person who succeeds in this role will be as comfortable making progress in conditions of imperfect information as they are thinking about long-term maturity, and will build credibility through delivery.

Principal Accountabilities

• Deliver the highest standard of stewardship to both Fastmarkets’ enterprise data and proprietary data, maximising its value as a core asset of the business.
• Carry out an assessment of the current state of data governance at Fastmarkets – identifying where standards, ownership, and practices already exist, where the most significant opportunities lie, and where early action will deliver the greatest tangible value.
• Design and implement a Data Governance Framework that is well-suited to where Fastmarkets is today – practical, proportionate, and built to evolve as organisational maturity continues to develop.
• Define data quality standards across critical data domains – including pricing data, customer data, product and entitlement data, and operational data. Put in place the monitoring, reporting, and accountability mechanism to drive sustained improvement.
• Build and maintain a business glossary and data catalogue, beginning with the domains of greatest importance and expanding coverage progressively – with a focus on usefulness and adoption at every stage.
• Work closely with Data & Technology teams to embed governance into platforms, pipelines, and tooling – finding practical ways to make good data practice straightforward for engineering and product teams.
• Establish a Data Governance Forum with cross-functional representation, creating a productive space where data issues are surfaced, ownership is clarified, and decisions are reached.
• Partner with Editorial and Analytics teams to ensure governance standards reflect the specific requirements of price assessment and forecast production – protecting the integrity that underpins Fastmarkets’ commercial reputation.

Qualifications

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

Essential

• Demonstrable experience delivering data governance in practice – taking frameworks from concept through to implementation in organisations with real-world complexity, competing priorities, and evolving technical landscapes.
• Strong understanding of core data management disciplines: data quality management, master data management, metadata management, data lineage, data cataloguing, and data classification – combined with the judgement to sequence and prioritise effectively.
• Experience establishing governance structures (data councils, stewardship networks, working groups) in environments where these are new, and building genuine engagement through influence and relationship rather than top-down mandate.
• Familiarity with best-in-class tools for data governance, cataloguing and lineage technologies (eg, Collibra, Atlan, Alation, Apache Atlas, OvalEdge) with the ability to make sound, proportionate tooling choices that serve immediate needs and future ambition.
• Strong stakeholder skills: able to build trust and rapport quickly, work effectively across functions without direct authority, and bring people to shared understanding and agreed action.
• A clear and confident communicator: able to articulate the value of data governance in commercial terms and make complex concepts accessible to a wide range of audiences.
• A natural problem-solver who is comfortable working with incomplete information: able to set a clear direction, make a start, and refine the approach as understanding deepens.
• Sufficient technical grounding to work as a genuine peer alongside data engineers, architects, and platform teams – with the systems knowledge to identify where governance can be embedded effectively.

Desirable

• Experience in/knowledge of Data Protection/Data Privacy.
• Experience in a financial data, price reporting, market intelligence, or information services business.
• Familiarity with ultra-modern data platform technologies (eg, Snowflake or Databricks)
• Experience in governance requirements specific to AI systems (model governance, training data provenance, bias management)
• Relevant professional certifications such as DAMA CDMP (Certified Data Management Professional), DCAM, etc
• Understanding of data commercialisation – including data licensing, data product development, and the governance implications of monetising proprietary data assets.

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Additional Information

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

We are committed to ensuring all candidates feel welcomed and supported. Should your application advance and you require accommodations for the interview process, please inform us so we can make the necessary arrangements.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.

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