Senior Analytics Engineer

Sanlam; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Join Sanlam as an Analytics Engineer and help reshape financial advice across Africa. You'll design data models, coach team members, and build innovative data products using modern technologies like Snowflake and dbt. This role is perfect for you if you thrive in an autonomous environment and seek to make a significant impact.

Benefits

Mentorship from seasoned professionals

High ownership and autonomy in projects

Opportunity to impact millions

Qualifications

• 5+ years in analytics, data science, or engineering.
• Advanced SQL and data transformation experience.
• Experience deploying analytics data products in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Design data models and create friendly data tables across the company.
• Mentor junior analytics engineers to modernize data practices.
• Facilitate alignment on design principles across teams.

Skills

SQL

Data modeling

Collaboration

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

Job description

Who are we?

Sanlam Fintech is a newly established digital first business within the Sanlam Group on a mission to democratize financial advice and solutions for everyone across the African continent. We exist to pioneer inclusive financial confidence helping people build strong foundations to bridge the gap in generational wealth. Our culture us that of agility and constant deployment, we believe in learning fast, learning cheap and learning forward. Our aim is to provide a work environment where knowledge workers can accelerate the development of their ideas and bring innovation to market, at the same time provide compelling career and development proposition that will enable them to realize their dreams.

Position Overview

As an analytics engineer your work is a canvas for change, painted with the data you create and the insights you enable. You're not just joining a team; you're embarking on a mission to reshape the financial landscape, making tomorrow not just different, but better. Turning data into pathways, obstacles into stepping stones, and potential into reality. Together, we can transform financial confidence across Africa, one friendly data product at a time.

This is our first Analytics Engineering role focused on building analytics friendly data products and modernising our analytics engineering practice across the company!

What you'll achieve in the first 12 months

• Complete the first version of a Sanlam FinTech Friendly Data Design (e.g. conceptual and logical model plus ubiquitous language). Work across product and business managers, backend and data engineers, individual contributors and team leads to accumulate a critical mass of team knowledge about both our domain model and how that relates to our source data landscape. Apply this knowledge to develop a simplified conceptual and logical model, map the entities to their source system origin tables, and distill our domain specific languages into a common ubiquitous language.
• Have friendly data tables for the five most consumed domain events in SFT (i.e. Fact tables) that act as the single authoritative representation of those events for across the company. Bring the five most needed domain events from the friendly data design to life in Snowflake by physically modelling them to complete the design process, and executing to build highly reliable data products using DBT that the entire company can rely on.
• Enable alignment and interoperability across all of Sanlam’s data: Work across the company with other data product teams to facilitate alignment on design principles, language, and production standards.
• Coach and mentor other analytics engineers and business analysts across the company: Help modernize the practice of preparing data for learning at Sanlam. Coach junior and mid engineers to improve their already strong code quality and analytical solving. Be the strongest conceptual modeler and engineer that everyone looks to for tips on how to improve their analytics engineering practices.

How you'll think

• You’re high agency. Looking for ways to do, instead of reasons not to.
• Where some see impossible, you see a way: Turning obstacles into opportunity, chance into change.
• You love creating more with less. Knowing that the biggest impact is born of the smallest acts.
• You seek out and value different perspectives. Believing thatwhen we change how we look at things, how things look for us also changes. Making tomorrow not just different, but better.

What you'll enjoy

• Being in a high ownership, high ambiguity, high autonomy environment where the impact of your work matters. The ideal environment for your capability growth.
• Learn from the best. Get guidance from some of the most seasoned professionals around. Our mentorship vibe is all about growing together, both professionally and personally.
• Diving into projects that touch the lives of millions. Making a real difference in how people grow and protect their wealth.
• Working with modern technologies, such as Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and AI-assisted development environments to launch into your work.

Qualifications and Experience

• 5+ years of experience working in analytics, data science, data engineering or analytics engineering (e.g. data engineering including data modeling, analytics roles involving engineering work).
• Advanced SQL skills and hands-on experience with data transformation frameworks (e.g. dbt).
• Hands-on experience with data modelling and building analytics-ready data products.
• Collaboration experience with analytical roles (scientists and analyst), and engineering roles (data and software engineers).
• Experience designing semantic data layers, fact and dimension tables, and entity-level models across complex business domains.
• Experience deploying analytics data product in modern cloud data stack (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Glue, etc), following engineering best practices.
• Familiarity with development frameworks and orchestration tools used in the industry: Git, CI/CD for data pipelines, airflow.

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping our employees to realise their worth. Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Core Competencies Being resilient - Contributing strategically Collaborates - Contributing strategically Cultivates innovation - Contributing strategically Customer focus - Contributing strategically Drives results - Contributing strategically Turnaround time

The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers.

The Sanlam Group is committed to achieving transformation and embraces diversity. This commitment is what drives us to achieve a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace as we believe that these are key components to ensuring a thriving and sustainable business in South Africa. The Group's Employment Equity plan and targets will be considered as part of the selection process.