Senior Data Analyst job description

Data and analytics — Senior Data Analyst
Leads complex analyses and sets the standard other analysts follow.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Data Engineering
- Analytical SQL Querying — You can diagnose and rewrite a query that is timing out a production dashboard, and you set the SQL style and review standards your team follows.
- Dimensional Data Modelling — You can redesign a model that has drifted from the business it describes, migrating its consumers without breaking their reports.
- Data Pipeline Development — You can design the pipeline architecture for a new data domain, including how failures are surfaced and how a bad run is safely reversed.
- ETL/ELT Transformation Design — You can design a transformation layer for a new dataset, choosing what to compute once centrally versus leave to the query, and test it against known-good output.
- Data Warehouse Architecture — You can design the layering, partitioning and access pattern for a new subject area, balancing query speed against storage and compute cost.
- Data Pipeline Monitoring and Alerting — You can decide what to monitor on a pipeline you own and set thresholds that catch real problems without crying wolf. You spot the silent failures, such as a column quietly going null, that no job error reports.

Data Governance
- Data Quality Monitoring — You can set the quality bar for a data domain, decide what blocks a pipeline versus what only warns, and drive a fix upstream rather than patching downstream.
- Metric Definition and Governance — You can set the metric governance process for a domain, including how a new metric gets approved and where its single source of truth lives.
- Data Lineage and Documentation — You can map lineage across a full transformation chain and write documentation another analyst uses without coming back to you. You record who a dataset is for and what it should not be used for.
- Data Privacy and Compliance — You can design a dataset or pipeline so it collects and retains only what its purpose requires, and answer a subject access or deletion request against it.
- Role-Based Data Access Control — You can design the roles for a dataset you own, matching what each group may see, query or export to how sensitive the data is. You run access reviews and remove permissions that are no longer justified.

Statistics & ML
- Statistical Analysis and Inference — You can design the statistical approach for a complex or contested analysis, and catch a misuse of statistics in someone else's work before it ships.
- Experiment Design and A/B Testing — You can set the experimentation standards for a product area, including guardrail metrics, and stop a launch being pushed through on a cherry-picked result.
- Predictive Modelling Fundamentals — You can build, validate and compare a small set of models for a real business problem, choosing metrics that match what the business actually cares about.
- Feature Engineering — You can decide which features a model needs from the data available, test whether they actually improve it, and drop the ones that do not earn their place. You keep them interpretable enough to explain to the business.
- Forecasting and Trend Analysis — You can pick and justify an approach for a series you have not forecast before, and state the uncertainty in terms a decision maker can use. You say when the history is too thin to forecast at all.

Visualisation
- Dashboard Design — You can set the dashboard standards for a domain, including performance and definition consistency, and retire dashboards nobody uses.
- Data Visualisation Best Practice — You can choose encodings that make the real pattern visible without exaggerating it, and design a chart a reader reads correctly at first glance. You defend a plain chart over a striking one when the plain one is more honest.
- Exploratory Data Analysis — You can take an unfamiliar dataset and work out what it can and cannot support, finding the duplicates, gaps and outliers that would break an analysis. You say when the data will not answer the question asked.
- Stakeholder Analytics Translation — You can manage analytics relationships with senior stakeholders across a function, setting expectations about what data can and cannot tell them.
- Analytics Storytelling and Reporting — You can structure a report so a busy reader gets the point in the first minute and knows what to do with it. You pitch the depth to the audience and say what you recommend, not only what you found.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Salesforce Certified Tableau Desktop Foundations (required from Data Analyst)
- AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (required from Senior Data Analyst)
- Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate (required from Senior Data Analyst)