Lead Data Analyst; Rankings

Role:
Lead Data Analyst (Rankings)

Location:

UK, London

Applicants must have the existing right to work in the UK. This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

Job type:
Full time, Permanent – Hybrid

This position offers a hybrid work model, allowing flexibility between working from home and our office. Typically, employees are expected to work 2 days in the office per week.

At QS, we believe that work should empower you. That’s why we foster a flexible working environment that encourages every employee to own their career whilst flourishing personally and professionally. Our company values underpin everything we do – we collaborate, respect and support each other.

It’s our mission to empower motivated people around the world to fulfil their potential through higher education, ensuring that everyone has access to opportunities that change lives.

Our diversity makes us stronger. By sharing our experiences, we learn from one another and achieve more together, driving progress across the sector.

At QS, you’ll be responsible for implementing real change in the international higher education landscape. You’ll take on meaningful challenges that see a positive impact across the business and the wider sector.

We’re confident you’ll feel right at home here. QS was named as one of Newsweek’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® in the UK (October 2023), recognising the respect, trust and appreciation that drive our culture every day. And as a gold-accredited Investors in People organisation – putting us among the top 28% of workplaces globally – it’s official: QS is a place where everyone can thrive.

QS is looking for a Lead Data Analyst. This is a senior technical role at the heart of QS's rankings capability. You will take responsibility for the technical implementation, testing and production infrastructure, combining rigorous statistical and mathematical thinking with best-in-class data engineering and analysis to ensure our rankings remain the trusted source of higher education performance intelligence.

This role will be internal and external facing. You will act as a senior technical representative, supporting external engagement by explaining and evidencing QS methodologies, engaging directly with senior institutional stakeholders, and building credibility with the academic and data-science communities that scrutinise our methodology. Internally, you will drive methodological evolution, identifying where current approaches can be improved and ensuring adoption of more sophisticated statistical methods across data collection, production and analytical pipeline.

• Assess and evidence methodological changes using agreed evaluation criteria (e.g., stability, fairness, transparency, and susceptibility to data issues).
• Develop new analytical methods into the rankings production and downstream analysis pipeline.
• Develop and maintain rigorous sensitivity analyses and simulation frameworks to stress-test ranking outputs against methodological and data-quality interrogation.
• Stay at the forefront of the academic literature on composite indicators, university performance measurement, and data science, translating relevant advances into practical methodology improvements.

• Lead the technical aspects of the rankings production, working with data operations and engineering colleagues, ensuring the data pipelines, primarily in dbt (data build tool), are modular, tested, and implemented with version-controlled transformation logic.
• Work closely with the data engineering team to align rankings data models with QS's broader Snowflake/AWS data lake architecture, ensuring rankings data is available to all internal stakeholders through the platform.
• Manage and mentor data analysts and engineers, elevating the team's technical standards and fostering professional growth.
• Enforce data quality frameworks, including automated validation, anomaly detection, and audit trails to ensure production-grade reliability for all ranking inputs and outputs.
• Build reusable analytical tooling and notebooks that…