Specialist, Metadata

Company Description

Standard Bank Group is a leading Africa-focused financial services group, and an innovative player on the global stage, that offers a variety of career-enhancing opportunities – plus the chance to work alongside some of the sector’s most talented, motivated professionals. Our clients range from individuals, to businesses of all sizes, high net worth families and large multinational corporates and institutions. We’re passionate about creating growth in Africa. Bringing true, meaningful value to our clients and the communities we serve and creating a real sense of purpose for you.

Job Description

The Metadata Specialist is responsible for maintaining, enhancing, and governing enterprise metadata to support data discovery, lineage, governance, and analytics across the bank. The role ensures accurate and standardised metadata to enable trusted data usage, regulatory compliance, and improved data quality. Support the execution of Metadata strategies in line with Enterprise Metadata policies and frameworks to ensure data has context, is easily accessible, and there is high-quality and integrated metadata.

• Maintain enterprise metadata standards, definitions, and business glossaries.
• Ensure compliance with data governance policies and regulatory requirements.
• Create, update, and maintain metadata within enterprise data catalog tools (e.g., Azure Purview / Microsoft Purview).
• Support automated and manual metadata ingestion processes.
• Document system, technical, and business metadata for structured and unstructured data assets.
• Ensure that metadata updates are in line with the governance processes defined by the owners / stewards of the data.  Gives input into possible data element governance violations in order that the appropriate governance structure is advised.
• Support the adoption of AI-powered tools to automate metadata capture, classification, and enrichment, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy. Contribute to the development of sematic models, ontologies and knowledge graphs to enable advanced data discovery, lineage tracking and AI explainability.
• Develop and maintain end‑to‑end data lineage for critical data flows.
• Apply data classification rules based on sensitivity, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in information management, Computer Science, Data Science, Library Science, or related fields.
• Professional certifications in Data Governance, i.e. Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP), Certified Information Management Professional (CIMP) or related Data Management, or Azure Purview can be an advantage.

Experience:

• 3–6+ years of experience in Metadata Management, Data Governance, or Data Management roles.
• Experience with metadata catalog tools (e.g., Microsoft Purview, Collibra, Informatica).
• Familiarity with data lineage, business glossary development, and data quality management.

Additional Information

Behavioural Competencies:

• Adopting Practical Approaches
• Articulating Information
• Challenging Ideas
• Developing Expertise
• Documenting Facts
• Embracing Change
• Interpreting Data
• Managing Tasks

Technical Competencies:

• Big Data Frameworks and Tools
• Data Engineering
• Data Integrity
• IT Knowledge
• Stakeholder Management (IT)