Analytics Engineering Lead

Position Overview

This is our first Analytics Engineering leadership role focusing on building analytics friendly data products and modernising our analytics engineering practice across the company!

What will you'll achieve in the first 12 months

• You’ve hired and/or incubated world class analytics engineering talent: Through a thorough, evidence-based interview process you’ve hired (or internally transferred) top South African talent and nurtured them to a world class standard. Success will be measured by hiring the 2 open roles within your first 3 months who meet their onboarding performance objectives on their 12-month anniversary.
• You’ve completed the first version of a Sanlam FinTech Friendly Data Design (e.g. conceptual and logical model plus ubiquitous language). Work across product and business managers, backend and data engineers, individual contributors and team leads to accumulate a critical mass of team knowledge about both our domain model and how that relates to our source data landscape. Apply this knowledge to develop a simplified conceptual and logical model, map the entities to their source system origin tables, and distill our domain specific languages into a common ubiquitous language. 
• You and your team have built friendly data tables for the five most consumed domain events in SFT (i.e. Fact tables) that act as the single authoritative representation of those events for across the company. Bring the five most needed domain events from the friendly data design to life in Snowflake by physically modelling them to complete the design process, and executing to build highly reliable data products using DBT that the entire company can rely on. Success will be measured by test coverage of the tables as well as Service Level Indicators covering Accuracy, Recency and Availability. 
• You’ve enable alignment and interoperability across all of Sanlam’s data: Work across the company with other data product teams to facilitate alignment on design principles, language, and production standards. Success will be measured by % coverage of Sanlam entities made available for learning through modern analytics engineering practices. 
• You’ve cultivated a group-wide community of practice and mentored other analytics across the company: Help modernize the practice of preparing data for learning at Sanlam. Coach junior and mid engineers to improve their already strong code quality and analytical solving. Be the strongest conceptual modeler and engineer that everyone looks to for tips on how to improve their analytics engineering practices. Success will be measured by both the observable growth in the capability across the org (e.g. less time spent on code review) and the direct feedback you get from them about the positive impact you’re having on their practices. 

Qualification and Experience

• 7+ years' experience in data with 2+ years executing or leading modern analytics engineering practices in a modern context with cloud technologies and autonomous high performing team organisational patterns
• Experience with dbt core or dbt cloud will be considered a major advantage!
• Hands on experience as a data analysts, scientists, engineer or Analytics engineer at some point in your career.
• A track record of high impact and investing in your own development
• Ability to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical roles 

How you'll think

• You’re high agency. Looking for ways to do, instead of reasons not to. 
• Where some see impossible, you see a way: Turning obstacles into opportunity, chance into change. 
• You love creating more with less. Knowing that the biggest impact is born of the smallest acts.
• You seek out and value different perspectives. Believing that when we change how we look at things, how things look for us also changes. Making tomorrow not just different, but better. 

What you'll enjoy

• Being in a high ownership, high ambiguity, high autonomy environment where the impact of your work matters. The ideal environment for your capability growth. 
• Learn from the best. Get guidance from some of the most seasoned professionals around. Our mentorship vibe is all about growing together, both professionally and personally. 
• Diving into projects that touch the lives of millions. Making a real difference in how people grow and protect their wealth. 
• Working with modern technologies, such as Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and AI-assisted development environments to launch into your work. 

Knowledge and Skills

Personal Attributes

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping  our employees to realise their worth. Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Core Competencies

Turnaround time

The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers. 

Our commitment to transformation