BI Solution Architect at Santam Insurance

What will you do?
The Information Management department has a position available for a BI Solutions Architect, in the Business Intelligence Solutions team, based in Bellville, Cape Town.

The BI Solution Architect will be a member of the delivery team, supporting both new development/project and production support, as the highest-level technology domain expert. The BI Solution Architect is responsible for the assessment of business requirements; collection and identification of technical specifications and the subsequent development of technology solutions that require development to be viable. The BI Solution Architect will envision and create solutions that meet requirements and their points of integration, prove the feasibility of a design, guide a solution through to its completion, and ultimately can be implemented and supported in production.

The BI Solution Architect will work with the Enterprise Architecture team to ensure that new technology solutions are designed for optimal access and usefulness, and leverage existing technologies for their specific technical domain(s) and understand system-wide impacts.

•     Develop and work within agreed design principles
•     Designing and implementation of data architectures 
•     Develop technology specifications and ensure that new technology solutions are designed for optimal access and usefulness and leverage existing technologies when possible.
•     Map solutions in Enterprise architecture
•     Work together with Product Owners, Scrum Masters and Development teams whilst using Confluence and Jira.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

•     Relevant Tertiary IT Qualification 
•     Certificate or Diploma in Data Warehousing from industry recognised Training Institution will be an advantage but not essential
•     Between 5 - 8 years of experience in a BI Solution Architecture 
•     Certification as a cloud engineer will be an advantage  

What will make you successful in this role?
KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

•     Expert Data Warehousing knowledge
•     Experience in BI solutions architecture, traditional and big data solutions
•     Industry best practice knowledge for BI architectures, coding (ETL) and technical warehouse solutions
•     Proven track record of successfully delivering BI and/or data warehousing projects.
•     Sound knowledge of the Agile manifesto and Scrum framework
•     Translation of business requirements into the appropriate architectures 
•     Must be able to design and implement data strategies – acquisition, migration, ETL, Archiving etc
•     Develop technology specifications and ensure that new technology solutions are designed for optimal access and usefulness, and leverage existing technologies when possible
•     Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design a solution that meets operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability and manageability.
•     Great communication skills
•     Documenting architectures 
•     Link analytically obtained information from various sources to solve problems 
•     Able to draw conclusions from detailed structured and unstructured data
•     An enquiring mind with a wide degree of creativity and lateral thinking
•     Problem solving and decision making
•     Focusing and guiding others in accomplishing work objectives by setting goals, establishing best procedures, measuring and facilitating performance, and developing plans for improvement
•     Striving for continuous competitive improvement in line with business requirements
•     The ability to extract general principles from specifics
•     Show a strong desire to establish standards and best practice
•     Strong experience in business, data, and application analysis for data migration
•     Ability to consider all relevant architecture related needs such as synchronised indexes, key constraints, triggers, table partitions, table bucketing, multiple sql formats, database compression, memory utilisation, different data types  
•     Understanding of database technologies including database layers and locations agreed e.g. landing, staging, atomic, on-premise, cloud, hybrid
•     Experience in the financial/insurance industry will be an advantage
•     Experience in big data solutions (Hadoop) will be an advantage
•     Technical ability in ETL concept, design and development
•     Excellent SQL skills
•     Quality Assurance / Testing skills
•     Effective time management skills
•     Knowledge of IT System Development Life Cycles (SDLC) & agile methodologies specifically scrum
•     Provide technical guidance to coach and mentor team members 
   

Personal Attributes

• Manages complexity - Contributing independently
• Persuades - Contributing independently
• Action orientated - Contributing independently
• Business insight - Contributing independently

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 four business clusters – Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Emerging Markets, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Core Competencies

• Cultivates innovation - Contributing independently
• Customer focus - Contributing independently
• Drives results - Contributing independently
• Collaborates - Contributing independently
• Being resilient - Contributing independently

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
The Sanlam Group is committed to achieving transformation and embraces diversity.  This commitment is what drives us to achieve a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace as we believe that these are key components to ensuring a thriving and sustainable business in South Africa.  The Group's Employment Equity plan and targets will be considered as part of the selection process.