Snr Big Data Engineer at Sanlam Group

Role Description

• You will lead our BI Technical teams to develop and operate our Customer and Sales Data Warehouses. You will establish BI Assets using our existing Data Platform, and both develop, as well as drive the implementation of platform extensions where required. You will also fulfill the role of solution architect where you will develop new patterns, and establish development procedures and processes. As a senior member of the team, you are expected to support and mentor BI developers, and contribute as part of the SBI IT leadership team.

What will you do?
Main responsibilities

• Engage with a wide range of technical stakeholders including data scientists, business analysts, data engineers, database administrators and solutions architects.
• Ability to define a structured approach to problem solving and delivery against it. 
• Working with other data engineers and data modelers, you will design, implement, and manage data vaults, data transformations and data pipelines
• Mentor BI developers within the team
• Low error rate, and high data availability in deployed solutions. 
• Ability to cultivate a culture of efficient best practices and suitable process to deliver BI Assets for business consumption
• Create and obtain buy-in of design standards, patterns, application functionality and principles
   

Key output/ tasks for this role:

• Design, document and communicate technical solutions that deliver on business requirements
• Fulfil the role of subject matter expert on all technical aspects of BI products
• Oversee all BI development / modelling activity incl. code reviews, issue resolution and general support
• Develop technical standards and best practices
• Identify opportunities to enhance and automate technical processes and solutions across BI projects and support operations
• Support developers / modellers to develop data and analytical models
• Form relationships and orchestrate delivery with key technical stakeholders across our business including architects
• Engage with technology vendors and external technical experts when conceptualising, designing, or implementing technical solutions
• Attend and present solutions at internal architecture forums
• Designing (and assisting with design) of architecture used by specialists in solutions.
• Constant refinement to standardize and implement new functionality based on experience and lessons learnt
• Designing and building reusable artefacts to improve speed of delivery and reliability of solutions
• Identifying performance enhancements for BI and Integration solutions
• Troubleshoot technical issues such as database non-performance, integration failures and code failures.
• Resolve critical data modelling issues impacting the functionality of BI products in production.

What will make you successful in this role?
Role Requirements:

Qualifications:

• Certifications or degree in Computer Science, Data Management, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Analytics and Analytics technology specific certifications will be a strong recommendation.

Experience in three (3) or more of the following areas are required: 

• At least 5 years’ experience in Data Warehousing, or Business Intelligence, or Data Pipelines. With at least 12 months in a team lead role.
• Experience in leading a team of senior software developers and analysts
• Experience in managing services provided by 3rd party vendors
• Demonstrated experience in delivering technical solutions that can be integrated into an on-premises BI platform
• Ability to do cost estimations for new workloads 
• Familiarity with the use cases, business purposes and quality of the data. 
• Development experience in BI with a solid background in SQL, application, and information architecture and ETL procedures is required. 
• Experience in software development processes and IT support management
• Knowledge of database management system (DBMS) physical implementation, including tables, joins and SQL querying. 
• Data warehousing principles based on Kimball and / or Data Vault patterns is required 
• Knowledge and experience of structured data, such as entities, classes, hierarchies, relationships, and metadata. 
• Ability to combine data from multiple sources when needed for the analysis. 
   

Knowledge of technical toolsets to perform all duties such as (but not limited to): 

• SAP Data Services, NiFi, Spark and SSIS; or other ETL / DI tools 
• SQL 
• SAP Hana (DB) 
• Cloudera / Hadoop 
• Cloud deployments and integration (especially AWS) 
• Some knowledge of Attunity, Cloudera, advanced visualisation technologies and data management experience is preferred and highly advantageous 
• Database exploration tools 
• Report generation tools 
• Scripting languages, especially Python, Java, Sparc 
   

Competencies:

• A proactive self-starter
• Excellent written and oral communication skills 
• A strategic mindset, 
• Client focused 
• Strong interpersonal skills and a passion for building new data services, offerings and solutions.
• Attention to detail with self-discipline, 
• Strong ownership and accountability
• Takes initiative on work-related matters; proactively 
• Ability to drive your ideas throughout the business, influencing others to understand the value in your opinions.
• Continuous learning mindset
• Curiosity
• Creates a culture of trust, ownership and accountability across teams and projects
• Excellent organizational and problem-solving abilities
• Outstanding communication, facilitation, negotiation, and coaching skills