PRINCIPAL DATA ANALYST

About the role

The Principal Data Analyst position within the Department of Technology and Innovation focuses on identifying, capturing, analyzing, and managing data to support organizational goals. This role involves working independently with various teams to determine how data analysis can contribute to better decision-making and planning. It also includes gathering data to support recommendations, turning information into insights, and supporting information governance.

Responsibilities

• Works independently with varying teams to determine how data analysis can support organizational goals.
• Gathers data to support recommendations to address problems, with appropriate contingency plans.
• Develops recommendations for resolution of problems and reviews recommendations with the team.
• Understands and applies information and data analysis requirements.
• Turns information into insights to support and enable key decisions and business processes.
• Supports information governance in conjunction with Architects and Data Stewards.
• Designs, creates, and maintains relational databases and data systems of moderate to high complexity.
• Works with open datasets, including populating and extracting data from internal and public open datasets.
• Performs data analysis, including conceptualization, modeling, and presentation of data.
• Performs a variety of technical tasks related to capturing, managing, and analyzing data.
• Cleans and prunes data to discard irrelevant information.
• Designs reporting dashboards to translate data into an understandable illustrative format and fulfills ad hoc reporting requests.
• Develops procedures for data validation, analysis, and presentation.
• Performs initial data exploration (e.g., binning, pivoting, summarizing, and finding correlations).
• Implements statistical models to identify and reveal trends, patterns, and relationships in data to provide guidance to others for decision-making processes.
• Actively suggests analytics opportunities and best practices.
• Catalogs and enables access to resident and external data sources.
• Helps to streamline analytics to go from experimentation into production.
• Supports innovative efforts by driving creativity, acting with agility, and thinking outside current boundaries.
• Makes data visualizations and reports to present to audiences using presentation layer tools.

Requirements

• Graduation from an accredited college with an Associate’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or a directly related field, plus two (2) years of data analysis work experience.
• Or graduation from an accredited college with a Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or a directly related field, plus one (1) year of data analysis work experience.
• Four (4) years of work experience in data analysis.

Qualifications

• Five (5) or more years of experience in data analytics.
• Experience with BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or AWS Quick Sight.
• Experience developing and managing ETL pipelines.
• A strong understanding of Data Governance.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL, Python, R, or Spark.

Skills

• 5 or more years of experience in data analytics.
• Experience with BI tools (Tableau, Power BI or AWS Quick sight).
• Experience developing and managing ETL pipelines.
• Strong understanding of Data Governance.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL, Python, R, or Spark.

Benefits

For information on our employees benefits, please visit our benefits website at: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/fin/benefits-office.html

For information on our salary and title structure, visit our classifications website at: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/dhr/supp_info/JobClassification/2025_Classification_and_Pay_Plan.pdf

Pay

$99,480 annually

Schedule

Monday-Friday, 8:00a.m. to 4:00p.m. (Flexible)

Location

2 N. Lasalle, Suite#1010 Chicago, IL 60602

Desired Skills

• 5 or more years of experience in data analytics.
• Experience with BI tools (Tableau, Power BI or AWS Quick sight).
• Experience developing and managing ETL pipelines.
• A strong understanding of Data Governance.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL, Python, R, or Spark.

Commitment to Diversity

The City of Chicago is committed to hiring applicants with diverse experience and adheres to the following ordinances:

• 2-74-020 - Provides a preference to applicants who meet minimum qualifications and are veterans of the Armed Forces.
• 2-74-075 - Provides a preference to applicants who are residents of Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Areas (SEDA) and/or Chicago Public School (CPS) high school graduates.

These hiring preferences do not apply to bidders, as Collective Bargaining Agreements define the hiring process for bidders.