Master Data Management (MDM) Lead at Nelnet in Lincoln, NE

Job description

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology and education services to more than 1,200 higher education institutions, nearly 12,000 K-12 schools, and millions of individual students, families, and supporters across the globe. Our culture of service enables us to form long-lasting and trusted partnerships, while our focus on creativity and innovative solutions empowers our customer communities to thrive. The Master Data Management (MDM) Lead owns the definition of customer, institution, and payment identity across Nelnet Business Services systems, including CRM platforms, enterprise payment and enrollment systems, and the Snowflake data platform. The role authors the match rules, thresholds, and survivorship logic that determine which record is authoritative when systems disagree, owns the canonical identifier architecture those rules produce, and independently validates that production pipelines enforce the standard as written. It sits within Data Governance and remains independent of the teams that build and operate the pipelines, preserving the separation between defining what “correct” means and executing against it, while working daily alongside data engineering, system owners, and implementation partners through CRM migration and consolidation efforts. The Master Data Management (MDM) Lead owns the definition of customer, institution, and payment identity across Nelnet Business Services systems, including CRM platforms, enterprise payment and enrollment systems, and the Snowflake data platform. The role authors the match rules, thresholds, and survivorship logic that determine which record is authoritative when systems disagree, owns the canonical identifier architecture those rules produce, and independently validates that production pipelines enforce the standard as written. It sits within Data Governance and remains independent of the teams that build and operate the pipelines, preserving the separation between defining what “correct” means and executing against it, while working daily alongside data engineering and system owners. JOB RESPONSIBILITIES: • Author, document, and maintain the match rules, thresholds, and survivorship logic that define golden records for customer, institution, and payment identity across NBS systems. • Own the canonical identifier architecture, including canonical institution and customer IDs, and define where those identifiers are assigned, stored, and enforced across the system landscape. • Establish formal entity resolution between business unit CRM records, replacing informal name and tax ID matching with documented, repeatable, business-approved match logic. • Define system of record and ownership rules for master data attributes, and adjudicate conflicts where multiple systems claim authority over the same entity or field. • Partner with data engineering to translate the match rulebook into production pipelines, and independently validate that pipeline output conforms to the approved standard. • Establish match quality thresholds and monitoring, including false positive and false negative review, and define manual stewardship workflows for records that cannot be resolved automatically. • Direct remediation of duplicate, conflicting, and orphaned master records at production volume, in coordination with the data quality program. • Embed master data requirements into system implementations, migrations, and integration design, including sequencing requirements for identifier assignment prior to data load. • Review vendor and implementation partner proposals covering identity resolution, migration mapping, and data acceptance criteria, and confirm scope boundaries before work is contracted. • Maintain version control, change history, and business approval records for all match and survivorship rules so that every value can be traced to its source system and governing rule. • Provide resolved, consistently keyed master data to downstream analytics