Senior Specialist: Business Intelligence

Lesaka Technologies; Gauteng; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,600,000; Full time

Job summary

Lesaka Technologies’ Lesaka Merchant unit seeks a Senior Specialist: Business Intelligence to design and deliver production-quality dashboards and self-service analytics. You will translate business needs into scalable BI solutions and contribute to BI platform governance.

You will own data modelling, build KPIs, optimize performance, and guide junior developers while collaborating with analytics engineers to ensure accurate, timely insights across lending, payments, and operations.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative or analytical discipline; postgraduate qualification advantageous.
• 6+ years of experience in BI development in a production environment.
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or a similarly regulated industry.
• Advanced proficiency in at least one enterprise BI platform (Power BI strongly preferred), including data modelling, DAX or equivalent, and workspace management.

Responsibilities

• Design and build dashboards, operational reports, and self-service analytics solutions for business stakeholders across lending, payments, customer, and operations domains.
• Translate requirements received through the Business Advisory team into technically sound and visually effective BI solutions, actively challenging requirements where a different design would better serve the underlying business need.
• Develop and maintain complex calculated measures, KPIs, and business logic within the BI layer, ensuring alignment with centrally defined metric definitions.
• Optimise dashboard performance, maintaining acceptable load times and query efficiency as report complexity and data volumes grow.

Skills

Dashboard design

Advanced SQL

Data modelling

Analytics governance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in quantitative/analytical discipline

Postgraduate qualification advantageous

Tools

Power BI

Job description

We’re Hiring: Senior Specialist: Business Intelligence | Data and Analytics

Are you an experienced BI professional with a passion for building enterprise dashboards and delivering high-quality analytics solutions?

Lesaka Merchant is looking for a Senior Specialist: Business Intelligence to join our Merchants Operations Division. This role is ideal for a highly skilled individual who can design and deliver production-quality dashboards, drive BI standards, and enable data-driven decision-making across the business.

Job purpose

Responsible for designing and delivering production-quality dashboards, reports, and self-service analytics solutions that provide business stakeholders with clear, accurate, and timely visibility of divisional performance; deliver production-quality solutions end-to-end and contributing to BI platform governance and standards in order to drive informed decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and ensure consistent, reliable insights across the business.

Key Responsibility Areas

BI Solutions Developed and Adopted

• Design and build dashboards, operational reports, and self-service analytics solutions for business stakeholders across lending, payments, customer, and operations domains.
• Translate requirements received through the Business Advisory team into technically sound and visually effective BI solutions, actively challenging requirements where a different design would better serve the underlying business need.
• Develop and maintain complex calculated measures, KPIs, and business logic within the BI layer, ensuring alignment with centrally defined metric definitions.
• Optimise dashboard performance, maintaining acceptable load times and query efficiency as report complexity and data volumes grow.

BI Governance and Standards established

• Contribute to and enforce BI development standards set by the Principal Specialist naming conventions, model design patterns, documentation requirements, and visual design principles.
• Manage the lifecycle of BI assets in the team's workspace, maintaining clear separation between certified, development, and exploratory content.
• Document all production BI assets clearly, including data lineage, metric definitions, and known limitations.
• Collaborate with analytics engineers to surface data model requirements and raise data quality issues encountered during BI development.

BI Specialist capability developed

• Provide substantive guidance and peer review to Specialist: Business Intelligence developers within the team.
• Invests in the development of junior BI developers through substantive code review and practical guidance.

BI Architecture & Platform Maintained

• Facilitate implementation of architecture components and governance of the BI platform, including workspace and folder structure, access controls, and performance monitoring.
• Manage the BI serving layer in collaboration with analytics engineers, ensuring data models and semantic layer definitions meet the needs of BI workloads.

Qualifications & Experience

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative or analytical discipline – Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Economics, Information Systems, or similar. Postgraduate qualification advantageous.
• 6+ years of experience in BI development in a production environment.
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or a similarly regulated industry, with an understanding of lending, payments, or financial product operations.
• Advanced proficiency in at least one enterprise BI platform (Power BI strongly preferred), including data modelling, DAX or equivalent, and workspace management.
• Strong SQL skills and demonstrated ability to work directly with data warehouse tables and views.
• Track record of independently building and maintaining complex, multi-page reports and dashboards for business operational and management audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements into well-designed BI solutions and to push back constructively where requirements are underspecified or misdirected.
• Working understanding of data modelling concepts sufficient to consume and contribute to analytics engineering outputs.

Key Competencies

• Analysing and forming opinions
• Accuracy
• Devotion to Quality
• Results Oriented
• Cooperation
• Providing feedback
• Creativity
• Planning
• Advanced SQL proficiency – Uses complex SQL to extract, transform, and analyse large datasets for BI reporting and insights
• Data modelling expertise – Designs scalable dimensional and semantic models that ensure consistent and reliable business metrics
• BI platform proficiency – Builds and optimises dashboards and reporting solutions using enterprise BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau
• Data warehouse understanding – Understands ELT/ETL processes and how data flows through warehouse structures to support BI solutions
• Data quality and validation – Applies reconciliation and validation techniques to ensure accuracy and consistency of BI outputs
• BI performance optimisation – Improves query and dashboard performance to ensure efficient handling of large and complex datasets
• Analytics engineering concepts – Works with structured transformation logic and reusable data models to support scalable BI delivery
• Dashboard design – Designs visually appealing and effective dashboards that communicate data and insights with clarity

Ready to deliver enterprise BI solutions at Lesaka Merchant?