Senior Director, Product Owner - Entity Data & Knowledge Graph (Chicago)

Senior Director, Product Owner – Entity Data & Knowledge Graph in our Chicago Office.  

Fitch Solutions is a leading provider of insights, data and analytics. It informs investment strategies, strengthens risk management capabilities and helps identify strategic opportunities. Its analysts, lawyers, journalists and economists offer in-depth views on credit markets and risk, individual credits, ESG, developed and emerging markets, and industry sectors. Fitch Solutions is part of Fitch Group, a global leader in financial information services with operations in more than 30 countries. Fitch Group is owned by Hearst. 

By becoming part of the Fitch Solutions team, you will join colleagues delivering critical data, insightful research and comprehensive analytics that empower clients to make informed decisions. You will work in a dynamic environment where innovation is encouraged and collaboration is central to developing solutions that address the evolving needs of global markets. With a portfolio of best-in-class, award-winning brands, we offer the opportunity to advance your career while contributing to a company known for its expertise and commitment to excellence.  

Platform Products is responsible for building shared capabilities that can be leveraged across the organization. We operate a product-led model focused on identifying common business needs, building reusable solutions once and enabling business units to adopt them at scale. At the heart of this is Fitch's entity and reference data foundation: the identifiers, symbology, hierarchies and relationships that connect our data across products and make it usable by clients, applications and AI.

Our mission is to accelerate innovation, improve consistency and reduce duplication by delivering platform capabilities across Fitch Solutions. While business units focus on domain expertise and commercial differentiation, Platform Products develops the foundational capabilities that support them all, including the entity services and knowledge graph that link Fitch's data together.

This is a senior individual contributor role for a hands-on product owner. You will own a portfolio of platform data products centered on entity resolution, symbology and knowledge graph capabilities, and you will work close to the detail. That means defining data models and ontologies, writing requirements, working through data quality problems, validating solutions with engineering and getting capabilities into production. You will lead through influence rather than line management. You will shape the vision and roadmap, align senior stakeholders, and steer cross-functional squads of engineers, architects and analysts to deliver scalable, reusable products that create measurable value across the business.

• Own the vision, strategy and roadmap for Fitch's shared entity and reference data capabilities. This includes entity resolution, symbology and identifier mapping, corporate hierarchies and ownership, and the knowledge graph that connects them.
• Get hands-on with the data. Define entity and relationship models, ontologies and metadata standards; profile and investigate data; shape matching and linkage logic; and write detailed requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Build deep expertise in Fitch's data, products, underlying architecture and integration points, and use it to guide investment decisions and how the platform evolves.
• Deliver entity resolution and matching services that business units and clients can use to identify, link and enrich data consistently, whether through APIs, bulk feeds or cloud data-sharing channels.
• Make Fitch's data AI-ready. Expose entities and relationships to LLMs and AI agents through graph services, APIs and emerging protocols such as MCP, with the metadata and provenance that let agents discover, navigate and trust them.
• Define and track data quality measures such as accuracy, coverage, fill rates and timeliness, alongside product measures such as adoption, reuse, client value and return on investment. Use them to set priorities and show impact.
• Own the product backlog in Jira, balancing strategic initiatives, business demand, technical enablement, risk and scalability, and translating goals into epics, investment cases and delivery plans.
• Run build-vs-buy and partner evaluations across data vendors, graph technologies and cloud platforms, and turn recommendations into delivery.
• Lead entity and reference data governance, covering identifier lifecycle, data model change control, standards and stewardship across domains.
• Drive adoption across business units by navigating competing priorities, resolving cross-portfolio dependencies and blockers, and escalating effectively when executive decisions are needed.
• Sponsor validation, user acceptance testing and release readiness so delivered capabilities meet business, control and quality expectations.
• Produce and champion clear product documentation, including data dictionaries, model specifications, process flows and release communications, to support transparency and adoption.
• Represent Platform Products in senior leadership discussions, communicating strategy, progress, risks and outcomes with clarity and credibility.
• Strengthen the product operating model by introducing practices that improve discovery, prioritization, delivery and measurement.

You May Be a Good Fit If

• You have 10+ years of experience in product ownership, product management or data product roles, with a substantial focus on entity and reference data.
• You have deep expertise in entity and reference data. This includes legal entity and company data, instrument reference data and symbology, global identifiers (such as LEI, PermID, FIGI, ISIN and CUSIP), and corporate hierarchies and ownership structures.
• You have a proven record of building entity resolution, matching and deduplication capabilities at scale, across millions of entities and multiple sources.
• You have hands-on experience with knowledge graphs or graph databases, including ontology design and relationship modelling.
• You have substantial experience at a financial information provider, data and analytics firm, exchange or financial institution.
• You have delivered shared data capabilities used across multiple business units or client segments.
• You have led cross-functional squads through influence in a matrixed organization, and you can align executives and technical stakeholders around complex priorities and investment decisions.
• You have strong knowledge of Agile and product-led delivery practices and tools such as Jira.
• You use data quality metrics, client insight and business outcomes to guide prioritization and measure success.
• You have exceptional written and verbal communication skills and can explain complex data concepts to technical, business and executive audiences.
• You have a bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience.

What Would Make You Stand Out

• You have built or run an entity graph, symbology service or master data platform at a major data provider, exchange or bank.
• You have experience with industry identifier schemes and open data standards, or have managed a public-facing identifier or entity data service.
• You have a background in credit, credit risk or private markets data, and understand how entity data drives credit analysis, counterparty risk and client workflows.
• You combine sound commercial judgment with a customer-centric, enterprise-wide perspective.
• You have knowledge of Fitch systems, products, data or client workflows.
• You show initiative, intellectual curiosity and a commitment to continuous learning.

Why Choose Fitch: 

• Hybrid Work Environment: 3 days a week in office required based on your line of business and location
• A Culture of Learning & Mobility: Dedicated trainings, leadership development and mentorship programs designed to ensure that your time at Fitch will be a continuous learning opportunity
• Investing in Your Future: Retirement planning and tuition reimbursement programs that empower you to achieve your short and long-term goals
• Promoting Health & Wellbeing: Comprehensive healthcare offerings that enable physical, mental, financial, social, and occupational wellbeing
• Supportive Parenting Policies: Family-friendly policies, including a generous global parental leave plan, designed to help you balance career and family life effectively
• Inclusive Work Environment: A collaborative workplace where all voices are valued, with Employee Resource Groups that unite and empower our colleagues around the globe
• Dedication to Giving Back: Paid volunteer days, matched funding for donations and ample opportunities to volunteer in your community

Fitch is committed to providing global securities markets with objective, timely, independent and forward-looking credit opinions. To protect Fitch’s credibility and reputation, our employees must take every precaution to avoid conflicts of interest or any appearance of a conflict of interest. Should you be successful in the recruitment process at Fitch Ratings you will be asked to declare any securities holdings and other potential conflicts prior to commencing employment. If you, or your immediate family, have any holdings that may conflict with your work responsibilities, you may be asked to divest yourself of them before beginning work.

Fitch is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status, and other statuses protected by law. 

Expected base pay rates for the role will be between $190,000 and $230,000 per year. Actual salaries will be determined on an individualized basis and may vary based on factors including but not limited to education, training, experience, past performance, and other job-related factors.  Base pay is one part of Fitch’s total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, discretionary bonuses, long-term incentives, and other benefits sponsored by Fitch.   

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