Job DescriptionCOLSA is seeking a Senior Data Catalog & Metadata Specialist to support NASA's Consolidated Applications and Platform Services (NCAPS) contract, specifically supporting NASA's Aerospace Capabilities Portfolio Office (ACPO) and its Digital Innovation & Integration Service Capability (DIISC) team. This role will make data across ACPO's teams, tools, and centers easier to find, understand, and trust by mapping data lineage, establishing a shared data catalog and metadata standards, and driving adoption across the portfolio.
This is a fully remote position open to candidates residing in the United States, excluding the following states: AR, CT, DE, HI, IA, KS, MT, NE, NJ, NY, RI, SD, VT, WV, and WY.
Responsibilities:- Catalog and describe the portfolio's data by creating clear, consistent, searchable records for datasets so users can find what exists, understand what it is, and determine whether they can use it.
- Build and maintain taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, a shared business glossary, and descriptive metadata and documentation standards.
- Set the cataloging and metadata standards the data team must follow and help ensure consistent adoption.
- Help analysts, engineers, and program staff find the right data, interpret it correctly, and understand its provenance and limitations.
- Onboard new datasets and retire stale ones by documenting provenance and ownership, applying sensitivity and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) classifications, and identifying data-quality concerns.
- Map the portfolio's data lineage end to end, including sources, systems, owners, flows, transformations, and downstream consumers.
- Work with the team's manager to select and onboard an enterprise data catalog tool, such as DataHub, Atlan, Collibra, Alation, or Microsoft Purview, including evaluating options, standing up the platform, defining the metadata model, and integrating it with portfolio data sources.
- Ensure the catalog integrates effectively with the team's data orchestration tool, Dagster.
- Define and track metadata completeness, documentation, and freshness metrics.
- Drive catalog adoption across the portfolio and serve as a point of contact for what data exists, where it resides, and how it should be described and used.
Required Experience- Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, data science, engineering, math, statistics, operations research, or a related field.
- Minimum of 2-5 years of experience in a data librarian, research data services, data curation, metadata, or data catalog role.
- U.S. Citizenship required; must be able to undergo a background investigation for a position of NASA Public Trust.
- Hands-on experience running a data catalog or metadata management platform (e.g., DataHub, Atlan, Collibra, Alation, Informatica, Microsoft Purview, or Amundsen), or equivalent experience managing a metadata repository or catalog.
- Ability to embed with the data team and understand its work, including pipelines, data flows, and how data is produced and used, sufficiently to capture lineage and metadata accurately and earn the team's trust.
- Strong command of metadata standards, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and data dictionaries.
- Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of a catalog, standard, or shared data practice across multiple teams.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate between technical and program audiences.
Preferred Qualifications:- Knowledge of data engineering practices, including pipelines and orchestration, warehouses and lakes, transformation workflows, and how metadata and lineage are produced throughout those processes.
- Knowledge of how teams source, prepare, and use data for analysis and modeling and what they need to trust and reproduce it.
Applicant selected will be subject to a government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.
