Senior Analyst

About The Role

Valenture Institute runs online high schools in South Africa. Our data team works with every part of the business, including academics, learner support, marketing, finance, and product, and this role will too. We are looking for someone who finds the problems worth solving, works out what is really causing them, and stays with the work until it changes something.

Data work has changed a lot in the past year. AI tools now handle much of the routine coding, so we care less about which tools you already know and more about how you think, how you work with people, and what your work achieves. You will need the technical baseline listed below, but between two candidates we will choose judgement, curiosity, and ownership over a longer list of tools.

Who you are 

• You are curious. When a problem surfaces, you keep investigating until you understand the core issue, and then you solve it.
• You take end-to-end ownership of your work, from the first conversation with a stakeholder through to rollout and adoption.
• You have a figure-it-out attitude. You pick up new tools and methods quickly and are comfortable working outside your comfort zone.
• AI is part of how you work every day, and you know when it is wrong and you need to step in.
• You build strong partnerships with the people you support. You understand what they need and act as their adviser while pushing for action.
• You can explain complex findings to non-technical people in a way that changes what they do next.
• You approach analysis with statistical rigour. You know the common data pitfalls and fallacies.
• You challenge the status quo, and you bring a workable alternative when you do.

What you will do

• Seek out business problems before they are handed to you, and diagnose what is actually going on.
• Gather requirements from stakeholders, simplify them, and prioritise the requests with the most impact.
• Work with operational teams on data-driven process improvements with a clear return.
• Build dashboards and write reports that give each audience a clear message and a next step.
• Model and prepare data in SQL and dbt, writing code that others can follow and reproduce, and maintain the pipelines it runs.
• Find and fix data quality issues so that the numbers people rely on stay correct and consistent.
• Work with internal and external technical teams to ingest and export data.

The baseline

• At least 3 years of experience delivering end-to-end data products with meaningful business impact.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent.
• Fluent SQL, with routine use of advanced SQL.
• Experience using AI tools in an IDE.
• Experience with ETL, data warehouses and orchestration tools.
• You built at least one deliverable that used an LLM to convert text or other unstructured data into insights or actions.
• Experience with version control using remote repositories.

Advantageous 

None of these is required. Where candidates are otherwise equal, they count.

• Experience in education, particularly with EdTech systems and data sources such as Moodle.
• Experience with any of our stack: Airbyte, Snowflake, dbt, Looker, Hightouch, GitLab and VS Code.
• Experience with data integrations such as APIs, event-based streams, webhooks and AWS tools.
• Python literacy. You do not need to write perfect code, but you should be able to read and understand someone else's.
• Experience building predictive or machine learning models, including framing the prediction problem, validating the model and monitoring it once it is live.
• Experience designing experiments or A/B tests.