Data Governance Team Lead - Telematics

Career Area:

Engineering

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Role Summary

Caterpillar is seeking an Engineering Team Leader to help build the data foundation for its connected products.

Caterpillar equipment generates large volumes of operational, engineering, diagnostic, and telematics data. Turning that data into trusted, understandable, reusable information requires more than collecting it. Data must have consistent definitions, appropriate context, clear ownership, measurable quality, discoverability, and controls governing how it is created and used.

The Engineering Team Leader - Data Governance will provide technical and project leadership for initiatives that improve the quality, governance, metadata, standardization, and usability of connected-product data.

This role will work across engineering, connectivity, digital products, data platforms, analytics, and AI teams to make Caterpillar data easier for both people and intelligent systems to discover, understand, and use appropriately.

What You Will Do

Data Governance Leadership

• Lead initiatives that establish consistent definitions, ownership, standards, and governance for connected-product data.
• Define and improve processes for data quality, metadata, lineage, stewardship, retention, and lifecycle management.
• Help establish authoritative definitions and common data models across engineering and digital systems.
• Define measurable data-quality expectations and drive resolution of systemic data-quality issues.
• Ensure business and engineering context is captured alongside technical data definitions.

Connected Equipment Data

• Work with teams responsible for telematics, equipment configuration, asset characterization, and other sources of connected-product data.
• Improve consistency between data generated by machines and the information consumed by engineering, analytics, condition monitoring, digital products, and AI.
• Coordinate improvements to data configuration, validation, and deployment processes.
• Identify opportunities to automate manual data-governance and data-quality activities.

Data Products and Discoverability

• Help transform important datasets into clearly defined, reusable data products with known ownership, quality expectations, documentation, and interfaces.
• Improve metadata and cataloging so users can determine what information exists, what it means, where it originated, and how it should be used.
• Partner with enterprise data-platform and governance teams to connect engineering data with Caterpillar-wide data standards and tooling.
• Help establish data structures and governance practices that support analytics, machine learning, Generative AI, and agentic AI applications.

Project and Technical Leadership

• Lead complex cross-functional data initiatives from problem definition through implementation and adoption.
• Develop project scope, priorities, roadmaps, milestones, and success measures.
• Coordinate engineers, data specialists, architects, product teams, and business stakeholders across multiple organizations.
• Identify dependencies, technical risks, and organizational barriers and drive them to resolution.
• Communicate project status, technical decisions, and recommendations to stakeholders and leadership.
• Mentor team members and strengthen data-governance and data-engineering capabilities across the organization.

What You Have

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or another related technical discipline.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
• Experience with data governance, metadata management, master/reference data, data catalogs, or data product management.
• Experience with telematics, IoT, connected products, industrial data, or engineering data.
• Experience with enterprise data catalogs such as Alation or comparable metadata/catalog platforms.
• Experience with data pipelines, APIs, SQL, Python, cloud data platforms, or modern data engineering.
• Experience with AI/ML data requirements and governance of data used by Generative AI and agentic systems.
• Experience working with globally distributed engineering and data teams.

Why This Role Matters

AI and analytics are only as reliable as the data and context available to them.

This role will help create the standards, metadata, quality controls, and reusable data structures that allow Caterpillar's connected-product data to become a dependable foundation for engineering, digital products, analytics, and AI.

Location - Chennai

Relocation - Domestic

5 days work from office

Posting Dates:

November 12, 2026 - November 25, 2026

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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