Torchora
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Lead Business Intelligence Analyst

💰 $110,000 - $160,000

Business IntelligenceAnalyticsDataLeadership

🎯 Role Definition

The Lead Business Intelligence Analyst is a senior individual contributor and people-lead responsible for shaping and executing the business intelligence strategy across the organization. You will architect scalable reporting and analytics solutions, lead a cross-functional BI team, translate complex business problems into data-driven solutions, ensure data quality and governance, and present executive-ready insights that drive strategic decisions. This role requires deep expertise in SQL, data modeling, ETL and cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery), experience building enterprise dashboards (Power BI, Tableau, Looker), and exceptional stakeholder management and leadership skills.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Business Intelligence Analyst with proven end-to-end reporting delivery
  • BI Developer or Analytics Engineer experienced in data modeling and dashboarding
  • Data Analyst/Analytics Lead who has driven cross-functional analytics initiatives

Advancement To:

  • BI Manager / Analytics Manager
  • Head of Business Intelligence / Director of Analytics
  • Senior Director / VP of Data & Analytics

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Analytics Lead
  • Data Engineering Lead
  • Analytics Consulting / Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design, development and deployment of enterprise-grade dashboards and reporting solutions (Power BI, Tableau, Looker) that translate business strategy into measurable KPIs and operational metrics.
  • Architect robust, scalable data models and semantic layers that support self-service analytics, consistent metric definitions and performant query execution for business stakeholders.
  • Own the end-to-end BI delivery lifecycle: requirements gathering, data modeling, ETL/ELT design, visualization, testing, documentation, and production rollout.
  • Mentor, coach and provide technical direction to BI analysts, BI developers and analytics engineers, setting standards for code quality, data modeling and visualization best practices.
  • Define and manage the BI roadmap in partnership with product, finance, operations and leadership, prioritizing work to maximize business impact and ROI.
  • Collaborate with data engineering to design and maintain the data warehouse architecture (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery) and ensure ETL/ELT pipelines meet performance, reliability and data lineage requirements.
  • Establish and enforce data governance, cataloging, lineage and metric reconciliation processes to ensure single source of truth and trusted analytics across the organization.
  • Translate complex business requirements into clear technical specifications, acceptance criteria and analytic implementations; act as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and technical teams.
  • Perform advanced analytics and ad-hoc analyses (cohort analysis, funnel analysis, lifetime value, segmentation) to uncover insights that inform strategy, pricing, product and marketing decisions.
  • Implement and maintain continuous improvement processes for BI, including performance tuning of queries, dashboards and BI infrastructure to reduce cost and latency.
  • Drive the adoption of self-service analytics by designing intuitive dashboards and training business users on tools, metrics definitions and data interpretation.
  • Lead cross-functional analytics projects — from scoping to delivery — coordinating with product, marketing, finance and operations to deliver solutions on time and within scope.
  • Develop executive-level reports and presentations, synthesizing complex datasets into clear narratives and recommended actions for C-suite and leadership teams.
  • Manage vendor relationships and evaluate BI tools, analytics platforms and managed services to support the BI strategy and technology stack.
  • Oversee testing, validation and reconciliation of reporting outputs with source systems; own the incident management process for reporting anomalies and data quality issues.
  • Define and track success metrics for BI initiatives; measure business impact and iterate on analytics products to maximize adoption and value.
  • Lead migrations and platform upgrades (e.g., on-prem to cloud, migrating from legacy BI to Power BI/Tableau/Looker) ensuring minimal disruption and improved capabilities.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation: data dictionaries, metric definitions, ETL logic, dashboard guides and onboarding materials for analytics users.
  • Champion analytics literacy across the company; run workshops, office hours and training sessions to raise proficiency in data-driven decision making.
  • Ensure BI solutions meet security, compliance and privacy requirements (e.g., role-based access, PII handling, GDPR/CCPA considerations).
  • Coordinate resource planning, capacity forecasting and recruitment needs for the BI team to meet evolving business demands.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in budgeting and cost optimization for BI tooling, cloud compute and storage costs.
  • Review and approve analytics-related procurement and third-party integrations.
  • Participate in cross-functional architecture reviews and data platform governance councils.
  • Provide backup support for on-call incidents related to reporting outages or critical data discrepancies.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert SQL skills for complex joins, window functions, performance tuning and query optimization across large datasets.
  • Strong data modeling expertise: star/snowflake schema design, dimensional modeling, slowly changing dimensions, and aggregation strategies.
  • Hands-on experience with BI visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Qlik — building performant, user-friendly dashboards.
  • Familiarity with cloud data warehouses and platforms: Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse.
  • ETL/ELT and data pipeline experience (dbt, Airflow, Stitch, Fivetran, Talend, Informatica) and understanding of ELT patterns.
  • Proficiency with scripting and analysis languages: Python (pandas, numpy), R, or similar for advanced analytics and data transformations.
  • Experience with BI semantic layers, DAX/MDX calculations, LookML or equivalent metric layer tooling.
  • Knowledge of data governance tools and practices: data cataloging (Collibra, Alation), lineage, metadata management and role-based access control.
  • Familiarity with analytics and experimentation frameworks: A/B testing, attribution modeling, causal inference basics.
  • Experience integrating data from multiple sources (APIs, transactional databases, event streams) and reconciling disparate datasets.
  • Version control and CI/CD practices for analytics code and BI artifacts (Git, Terraform, CI pipelines).
  • Performance tuning and optimization of dashboards to meet SLAs for load times and concurrency.
  • Understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) for data storage, compute and security configurations.
  • Strong Excel skills for quick ad-hoc analysis, pivot tables and financial reporting when needed.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinking and the ability to align analytics work with broader company goals and KPIs.
  • Strong stakeholder management and communication skills; able to present insights to technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Leadership and people management aptitude: mentorship, feedback, hiring, and developing high-performing analytics talent.
  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical reasoning; comfort working with ambiguous problems and incomplete data.
  • Data storytelling and visualization sensibility: craft clear narratives that drive action.
  • Project management and prioritization skills; experienced in Agile delivery and cross-functional coordination.
  • Influencing skills to drive adoption of recommended process changes and analytics practices.
  • Attention to detail and commitment to data quality and reproducibility.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to keep pace with evolving BI tools and methods.
  • Customer-focused orientation with the ability to translate business needs into practical analytics solutions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Business Analytics, Finance or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Science, MBA or equivalent advanced degree.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Data Science / Analytics
  • Statistics / Applied Mathematics
  • Economics / Finance
  • Information Systems / Business Intelligence

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years of progressive experience in business intelligence, analytics, data engineering or related roles.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of analytics/BI experience with 2–4 years in a lead or senior individual contributor capacity.
  • Proven track record leading BI programs, building enterprise dashboards, and delivering measurable business outcomes.
  • Demonstrated experience with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery) and modern BI stacks (dbt, Airflow, Power BI/Tableau/Looker).
  • Prior experience working with executive stakeholders and driving cross-functional analytics initiatives at scale.
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