Systems & Technology Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa Full time
Valenture is an exciting new start-up in the online education space. Our mission is to evolve what it means to “go” to school by transforming physical limitations into digital opportunities. We do this by providing students worldwide with a fully supported, global online high school experience, steeped in academic excellence and rooted in sustainable practices. We believe in providing more than just a quality online education – we’re dedicated to building and empowering a purpose-driven, global student body and equipping them to make the best of both their individual and collective futures.
The role:
We are looking for a passionate, agile and highly motivated data specialist to head up the Data Analytics function at Valenture Institute, managing both the data analytics and data science capabilities. Through a combination of strong business understanding, technical ability and solid analytical and problem-solving skills, the Head of Data & Analytics is responsible for driving a culture of data at Valenture, ensuring that the business has access to key metrics and is able to make informed decisions backed by accurate data. The ideal candidate must have experience in building end-to-end data solutions to democratize data across large organizations. They will be managing and prioritising the roadmap of the various data streams, ensuring that the data stack is robust and future-proof for the scalability of the business.
This role reports directly to the Head of Technology, working closely with technical and business stakeholders to understand, analyze, refine, prioritise and build the data requirements of the business. This role must be comfortable leading a data team, and work in an agile environment to innovate, craft, and drive intuitive features and solutions from concept to completion, to engage and delight our business users and promote the adoption of Valentures data stack.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
Thought leadership on the solutions architecture of Valenture Institute’s technical data stack; including data governance management and strategy, and company-wide reporting and visualisation
Maintain an end-to-end data solution that is cost effective, scalable and meets the reporting needs of the business, including dashboarding front end tools
Becoming the technical point person on Valentures data stack, including but not limited to Snowflake (data warehouse), Dataform (transform layer) and Looker (BI tool)
Ensure Valenture’s data policy is in line with industry standards and best practices
Manage Valentures data pipeline, ensuring that the system is robust and the correct data points are gathered and stored across Valentures’ technical ecosystem
Build ELT jobs based on jointly defined requirements to extract data from various cloud services, not yet incorporated into the data warehouse
Design for long term scalability and maintainability to meet the growing needs of the business, by adopting a robust data modelling framework
Manage 3rd party suppliers or contractors employed to assist with the development of the data function
Work with business stakeholders from the Valenture team to understand problems and data sources, and play the pivotal role of architecting data models to address needs
Be responsible for learning analytics at Valenture Institute, including the collecting and analysis of data about learners and their environments for the purpose of understanding and improving learning outcomes.
Gather requirements, build roadmaps, and write great documentation for data sources that need to be modeled
Manage the generation and distribution of reports to various Valenture stakeholders
Support bug fixing and performance analysis along the data pipeline, including writing tests
Be a strong advocate for a culture of process and data quality across development teams
Automate existing reports and work with stakeholders to streamline reporting and analysis within the business
Providing data-based technical support and assistance to the business, namely key data users
Allow business stakeholders to gain meaningful insights of our internal and external users’ behaviour, visualised for various stakeholder reports
Ensure close integration of data management and software engineering technologies into existing data structures
Manage team budget and any software or project related costs, accurately forecasting into the future
Define data roadmap and build stages, for both data analytics and data science streams
Oversee build and implementation of data solution, adhering to strict quality measures
Be the primary link between business stakeholders and the data development teams, ensuring business objectives are translated into high quality dashboards.
Collaborate with business managers and stakeholders to make sure the goals of the data team are clear and the vision is aligned with business objectives.
Make sure that there is buy-in from stakeholders on all major decisions and strategy and clear instructions and deliverables for the data engineers, communicating with stakeholders
Optimizing the value of the work the data team performs, overseeing the actual development of data models and dashboards, being a key player throughout each stage of a project.
Implement Quality Assurance processes, ensuring all deliverables are thoroughly tested and meet a high quality standard
Requirements
7+ years of professional experience
Bachelor of Science degree or equivalent work experience
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
Excellent communication and strong interpersonal skills
Ability to present complex ideas simply
Experience and knowledge of end-to-end data development process
Personal Skills & Attributes
Self-starter who can come up to speed quickly on our applications, technologies and processes
Confident presenter and a good written skills
Technical expertise and the ability to question, understand and challenge software implementation decisions and priorities
Strong interpersonal and team building skills, ability to work with a diverse team and influence change across functional and business boundaries
Strong project management, planning, and organization skills, including the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously in a fast-paced environment
Bold and optimistic personality: Strong drive and high energy; action and the results oriented
Solid technical background with an understanding of cloud based data development and platform technologies
ICAS Employee Wellness Programme
Family member discount for Valenture Institute
