Lead BI Engineer

About the role

You will be the founding BI Engineer at Altana, responsible for building the analytical infrastructure that enables data-driven decision-making across the entire company.

Responsibilities

• Build the BI Foundation
• Design and implement a scalable analytics data warehouse (or lakehouse) layer on top of Altana’s existing data infrastructure.
• Define the canonical dimensional model: facts, dimensions, conformed keys, and slowly changing dimensions for core business entities (customers, transactions, subscriptions, product usage, pipeline).
• Stand up and own the transformation layer (e.g., dbt) with version control, CI/CD testing, and documentation standards from day one.
• Establish a semantic/metrics layer so that “revenue,” “active customer,” and “retention” mean exactly one thing company-wide.
• Deliver Insight at Scale
• Create self-service datasets and exploration environments so that PMs, GTM leads, and finance can answer their own questions without filing a ticket.
• Own data quality monitoring, alerting, and incident response for the BI layer.
• Partner Across the Business
• Act as the embedded analytics thought partner for engineering leadership, product, sales, CS, and finance—translating business context into data requirements and vice versa.
• Proactively identify trends, anomalies, and opportunities in the data; surface them before anyone asks.
• Drive alignment on KPI definitions, measurement methodology, and reporting cadences.
• Set the Technical Direction
• Evaluate and recommend the BI tooling stack (visualization, orchestration, cataloging, observability) with an eye toward total cost of ownership and long-term maintainability while re-using infrastructure and tooling already part of the larger stack.
• Write the playbook: style guides, naming conventions, PR review standards, and on-call expectations for the BI function.
• Hire, mentor, and grow the BI team as demand scales.

Qualifications

• Must-Haves
• 7+ years of professional experience in analytics engineering, BI engineering, or a closely related data discipline.
• Deep fluency in SQL and at least one transformation framework (dbt strongly preferred).
• Strong dimensional modeling skills: star/snowflake schemas, conformed dimensions, incremental loading patterns.
• Production experience operating a modern lakehouse stack (e.g., Snowflake/BigQuery/ Databricks), including transformation tooling (dbt or DLT) and a BI layer (Looker, Tableau, or Sigma).
• Track record of defining and shipping company-wide KPI frameworks and executive dashboards.
• Comfort working in ambiguity: you have built a BI function (or a significant new workstream within one) from scratch before.
• Excellent communication skills—you can explain a data model to an engineer and a retention curve to a CRO with equal clarity.
• Nice-to-Haves
• Experience with Python for data pipelines, scripting, or lightweight ML/statistical analysis.
• Familiarity with SaaS business models and metrics (ARR, NRR, logo vs. dollar churn, cohort analysis).
• Exposure to supply chain, trade compliance, or government contracting domains.
• Experience with data cataloging or governance tools (e.g., Atlan, DataHub, Monte Carlo).
• Prior experience as the first or founding analytics hire at a growth-stage company.

Pay

$180,000- $210,000 USD

Schedule

Full-time