Staff Business Intelligence Developer

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The University of the Cumberlands is seeking a Staff Business Intelligence Developer to serve as the senior technical lead for business intelligence development within the Office of Innovation. This hands-on individual-contributor role designs, builds, and maintains enterprise Power BI solutions that support operational reporting, KPI tracking, executive visibility, and strategic decision-making across the University. The role has no direct reports today, but it is expected to establish BI standards and grow into a player-coach leadership role as the BI function and team mature.

A central focus is leading the transition of institutional reporting from legacy, ad hoc, and uncertified sources to certified data assets in Snowflake, rebuilding and validating Power BI reports and semantic models so reporting becomes consistent, trustworthy, secure, and scalable.

Key Responsibilities

Business Intelligence Development

• Design, develop, test, publish, and maintain Power BI dashboards and reports for executive and operational audiences across all functional areas (e.g., admissions, enrollment and retention, student experience, finance).
• Create and maintain reusable semantic models on certified Snowflake data assets, keeping shared business logic in Snowflake where practical and using Power BI for relationships, measures, security, and user-facing analysis.
• Write, optimize, and troubleshoot DAX, SQL, and data model logic; define BI-specific Snowflake views when needed.
• Implement Power BI security patterns, including row-level security and workspace permissions.
• Ensure BI products are accurate, performant, accessible, well-documented, and aligned with stakeholder needs.

Transition to Certified Data Assets

• Lead the BI-side migration from legacy and uncertified sources to certified Snowflake data assets, refactoring reports to use governed datasets and approved definitions.
• Validate outputs against approved definitions, prior-state reports, and business-owner expectations.
• Identify reports, measures, and models to rebuild, retire, consolidate, or replace.
• Reduce hidden business logic, duplicated calculations, and one-off reporting layers by moving reusable logic into governed Snowflake assets.

Stakeholder Partnership

• Partner with the Innovation team to translate scoped business needs into reporting requirements, semantic models, and dashboards.
• Clarify metrics, definitions, filters, and decision points with stakeholders, and provide BI guidance on feasibility, data readiness, and design during scoping.
• Challenge unclear requirements and push for better definitions while maintaining stakeholder trust.
• Communicate report logic, data limitations, and quality concerns clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, and support adoption of transitioned reports.

Technical Leadership and Mentorship

• Serve as the senior BI development resource in the Office of Innovation and establish best practices for Power BI development, semantic modeling, DAX, SQL, documentation, and report lifecycle management.
• Review BI work for accuracy, usability, maintainability, and performance; mentor team members and build internal BI capacity as the team grows.

Qualifications & Experience

Required

• Bachelor’s degree and 5+ years of hands-on experience developing enterprise Power BI dashboards, reports, and semantic models.
• Advanced Power BI skills: data modeling, DAX, performance optimization, report publishing, workspace management, and dashboard design.
• Strong SQL: joins, aggregations, CTEs, window functions, troubleshooting, and dataset validation.
• Hands-on experience building BI solutions on Snowflake or a comparable cloud data warehouse, including semantic models built from governed warehouse data.
• Strong command of BI data modeling concepts: star schemas, fact and dimension tables, measures, and reusable semantic layers.
• Experience implementing Power BI security, including row-level security and workspace access management.
• Sound judgment on whether a reporting need is best solved in Power BI, a semantic model, a reporting view, a certified dataset, or upstream data engineering.
• Strong visual-design judgment for executive and operational dashboards, with the ability to balance speed, accuracy, and maintainability.
• Ability to validate reporting outputs, identify data-quality issues, and communicate discrepancies clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Sound judgment around data privacy and role-based access.

Preferred

• Analytics experience in higher education.
• Direct Snowflake experience in a Power BI reporting environment.
• Power BI Service administration: deployment pipelines, dataflows, and workspace governance.
• Experience with source systems such as Workday Student, Blackboard, or Slate CRM.
• Familiarity with data governance, metric certification, metadata, lineage, and data-quality practices.
• Experience mentoring analysts, BI developers, or business users.
• Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate (PL-300) or equivalent.

Department: Office of Innovation

Reports To: Executive Director of Innovation

Location: Remote, with occasional travel to main campus (Williamsburg, KY) as needed

Job Type: Full-Time

Cumberlands is different by design. Our employees exemplify our motto in the pursuit of a

“life-more-abundant.”