Analytics Engineering Lead

Sanlam Fintech is a newly established digital first business within the Sanlam Group on a mission to democratize financial advice and solutions for everyone across the African continent. We exist to pioneer inclusive financial confidence helping people build strong foundations to bridge the gap in generational wealth. Our culture is that of agility and constant deployment, we believe in learning fast, learning cheap and learning forward.

Our aim is to provide a work environment where knowledge workers can accelerate the development of their ideas and bring innovation to market, at the same time provide compelling career and development proposition that will enable them to realize their dreams.

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

• 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 Fin Tech 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 ch 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.

• 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.
• Hands on experience with dbt core or dbt cloud.
• Hands on experience as a data analyst, scientist, 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.

• You’re high agency. Looking for ways to do, instead of reasons not to.
• Where some see impossible, you see a way:
  Turning obstacles…