Senior BI and Data Solutions Architect

SUMMARY:
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POSITION INFO:

Our client offers a wide range of investment and financial planning solutions to protect and grow your long-term wealth. They are one of South Africa’s largest investment management companies, offering a comprehensive range of client-focused investment solutions to end-investors, intermediaries, and larger institutions. Our client’s comprehensive investment offerings include both passively and actively managed unit trusts, hedge funds and segregated and pooled retirement funds along the asset class and risk/return spectrum.

Job overview:

The Senior BI and Data Architect is responsible for the design, validation and oversight of solutions built with in our Client’s BI capability. This includes their BI technology platform as well as infrastructure hosted by their Group IT.

In collaboration with other Architects within the business, you will contribute to Group-Wide data strategy and capabilities, which will be used to deliver robust BI and data systems that supports business, their users and developer communities, across the organisation in the context of digital transformation.

As an expert in BI and data thought leadership and leading-edge technology trends, you will strategically advise and shape BI and Data Architectures and platforms and guide the team to create high-quality data, application and technology solutions, overseeing the realization of the design into the final solution implementation, in support of the business’ requirements

You will stay abreast of industry and technology best practices and will nurture and develop the BI and Data competency in the company, across multiple streams and businesses.

Responsibilities:

• Define and continuously improve the Data and Solution Architecture standards for BI and Business Transformation:
  • Develop and maintain an understanding of the business strategy and evolving business priorities
  • Contribute to a structured BI Architecture approach and methodology for capturing the key strategic BI and Data requirements from business
  • Contribute to the definition and continuous improvement of the BI and Data Architecture framework and associated solution architecture patterns and standards
  • Align to the enterprise architecture in support of the business and regulatory information governance needs such as information security, enterprise information management, POPIA, etc.
  • Identify, define and communicate standards, guidelines, formats, meta-models, policies, best practices and governance practices for BI and Data Architectures and designs
  • Stay abreast of best practices and/or new developments in BI (Data Warehousing, Reporting and Analytics) and related disciplines and drive adoption as deemed appropriate
  • Create and design data and information asset management framework
• Define and create solution level BI and Data Architecture models that are aligned with business blueprints, non-functional requirements, delivery constraints, data, application and technology standards:
  • Analyse business requirements and create related architectures and designs for the baseline

(“as is”) and target (“to be”) solution architectures

• Define architecture and solutions for data acquisition, data integration and data management
• Define architecture governance processes and quality compliance criteria
• Perform quality assurance checks on BI and Data Architectures and designs and enforce quality compliance criteria to set policies and standards
• Perform quality checks on existing BI and Data Architectures and designs to identify potential business risks areas and make re-engineering recommendations
• Ensure BI and Data security conforms to information security and information governance policies and standards
• Develop, implement and manage the processes and mechanisms for classifying data and information assets in terms of its purpose, sensitivity and quality as well as the level of access control and protection applicable to it
• Create/maintain reference data and master data design. Develop, implement and manage the processes to assess data quality and diagnose and report issues for correction. Using data profiling, data quality monitoring and reporting tools, measure completeness, timeliness, accuracy, consistency, relevance and integrity and ensuring data is fit for its intended uses on the BI platform
• Develop, implement and manage the processes for metadata associated with the data on the BI platform. Develop and implement the end-to-end governance framework and model for creating, controlling and enhancing metadata on the BI platform
• Develop, implement and manage the processes that track the life-cycle of data on the BI platform from ingestion through to consumption as well as how it changes over time (Data lineage tracking is required for master data, reference data, transactional data and metadata on the BI platform)
• Develop physical data management architectures, policies, and practices and oversee the execution of procedures to manage data across its lifecycle on the BI platform from acquisition to consumption
• Design conceptual, logical, technical solutions and flowcharts for BI assets and Business Transformation Solutions
• Manage the integration of data assets from ingestion into consumption layer and overlaying data governance
• Install and configure information systems to ensure functionality
• Analyse structural requirements for new software and applications
• Migrate data from legacy systems to new solutions
• Improve system performance by conducting tests, troubleshooting and integrating new elements
• Optimise new and current database systems
• Define security and backup procedures
• Coordinate with the business to identify future needs and requirements
• Provide operational support for Management Information Systems (MIS)
• Coordinate with clients, data users and key stakeholders and develop and achieve various long term objectives for data architecture
• Design short term resolutions to achieve all goals and prepare data roadmap for management
• Determine procedure to identify and collect all required data, validate process and recommend improvements to business data
• Oversee and monitor all frameworks to manage data across transformation
• Design and provide support to all data management methodologies according to required standards
• Monitor and identify appropriate tools and systems to achieve all data technology goals
• Develop key metrics for tests on data and ensure integrity of same on data architecture
• Prepare documents for data architecture and maintain knowledge on large data structure as well
• Analyse information flow and recommend appropriate technology to provide support to all business processes and understand integration into enterprise architecture
• Analyse business requirements and create conceptual, logical and technical solution designs that will assist in the creation of solution prototypes
• Participate in design and architecture forums to create alignment with multiple stakeholders

• Provide expert BI (Data Warehousing, Reporting and Analytics) guidance, ensure solution architectures and designs are in line with best practices
  • Provide technical guidance and leadership in proposals, RFIs, RFPs, and BI Project team
  • Provide architectural oversight and guidance to Development Teams to ensure high-quality technical solution designs during the detailed design, build, test and deploy phases that conforms to architecture principles and standards
  • Mentor and guide Technical Leads/Senior Developers/Data Modelers/Business Analysts
  • Define and develop the overall BI architecture landscape in partnership with other domain architects and delivery teams
  • Review proposed solution architectures ensuring alignment with architecture principles, the architecture framework, reference architectures, set technology standards and identify critical gaps, and recommend improvements
  • Give guidance and advice to peers in respect to BI and data solution designs ensuring the designs conform to best practices and standards

Qualifications and Experience required:

• National Diploma/Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Informatics, Information Systems, Information Technology, Engineering or another quantitative field preferred
• 5-10 years related experience
• Application and data engineering background with a solid background in SQL is required
• Designing, building and maintaining a modern data platform, including data lakes, data warehouses, business friendly semantic layers, etc.
• Extensive experience with data warehousing (Kimball and Data Vault patterns are preferred) and dimensional data modelling (OLAP and MDX experience)
• Exposure to modern data platform technologies that support cloud, big data, real-time data provisioning, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence implementations, including event streaming based data pipelines (e.g. Kafka or NiFi)
• Understanding of the information management and information architecture domain(e.g. DAMA/ DMBOK)
• Data visualization and reporting tools (e.g. SAP Business Objects, PowerBI etc.).
• Understanding of identity and access management technologies (LDAP/Kerberos/SAML/IBM IAM products)
• Data architecture design and delivery
• Database technologies (e.g. SAP Hana, Teradata or similar) and database development (views, functions and stored procedure development)
• Hadoop components including HDFS, Hive, Spark, Oozie and Impala
• Object-oriented/object functional scripting languages: Python, Java, Scala or related
• Knowledge of various toolsets such as SAP Hana Studio, SAP Data Services, Informatica Data Quality Suite, Teradata, Cloudera big data storage and Microsoft PowerBI will be advantageous
• Relevant Data system experience in warehousing, ETL, Reporting, Management Reporting, Business Intelligence implementations, migrations and technology selection
• Relevant experience delivering business solutions using applicable technology
  Understanding of data flow from a technical and business perspective from source to output though Information management systems such as Data Warehouses and Data transformation hubs
• Understanding of Information Architecture domain (e.g. DAMA/DMBOK)
• Understanding of enterprise implications of data policy as it relates to other policy domains - Security, Regulatory, Legal, Tax and Channel conflict
• Experience in warehousing, ETL, Reporting, Management Reporting, Business Intelligence implementations, migrations and technology selection
• Demonstrated competence in business domain analysis, data warehousing (design and operations), and database design
• Demonstrated competence with benefits, design and management of structured and unstructured content and database/repositories (SQL, NoSQL, HDFS/Hadoop distributions, etc.) and hands-on experience with specific products
• Demonstrated competence with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle DBMS, SAP Business Objects, and related tools is valued
• Working knowledge of data science, data mining, OLAP programming, database management and programming, business process modelling and analysis
• Working knowledge of statistical computing and graphics programming languages (R, Python, etc.)
• Working knowledge of open source or commercial data visualization tools (BOBJ, Tableau, QlikView)
• Working knowledge of cloud-based offerings and vendor differentiation related to analytics and information processing capabilities (AWS, Azure)
• Proven work experience as a Data Architect, Data Scientist, Data Analyst or similar role
• In-depth understanding of database structure principles
• Familiarity with data visualization tools (e.g. PowerBI, Python and R)
• Database design
• Data maintenance, Database security, Database management
• Presenting Technical information

Skills:

• Architecture and design (UML, OO, SOA, etc.) S/W frameworks and methodologies (Agile, TOGAF, etc.)
• Solid track record in successful delivery solution architecture
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and logical skills
• Data analysis
• Database knowledge and monitoring
• Data security
• Data risk management
• Project architectural oversight
• Ability to mentor others and provide technical direction on data architecture, reporting, warehousing, and online analytical processing (OLAP) design
• Ability to communicate design solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences, clearly identifying and articulating the benefits to the business of recommended solutions and approaches