We’re First Central Insurance & Technology Group (First Central for short), an innovative, market-leading insurance company. We protect the things customers love so they can get on with what matters to them in life.
Data drives us. It fuels our outstanding distribution, finance, technology and legal services. Our underwriting skills are built on data expertise; it creates the insights we need to give the right cover to the right customers at the right price. But, it’s the people inside and outside our business that power us. They make us stand out, help us succeed. We’re ambitious. We’re growing. We’ve won awards.
At First Central, data is integral to everything we do. Ensuring that our colleagues can easily access data at the time they need it, using the right tool is critical to our daily operational and analytics needs.
We’re looking for a Senior Business Intelligence Platform Administrator to manage and maintain our business intelligence platforms and the operational processes that execute on those platforms who’ll be responsible for managing and maintaining the SAS, Power BI and ThoughtSpot environments within the organisation, ensuring that platforms and content on those platforms is available to the business in line with agreed SLAs.
As the Senior Business Intelligence Platform Administrator, you’ll be the technical expert in SAS and Power BI platform administration. You’ll mentor your colleagues in best practices and will take charge of ensuring our platforms are safe, secure, and performing at their best.
Ideally, you'll live a within a commutable distance from our offices in either Salford Quays, Manchester, Haywards Heath, West Sussex or Guernsey but don’t worry if you don’t - we're open to remote workers! We’re big on flexible working, so you'll spend most of your time working from home with a visit to the office when required, but of course, it’s your choice - if you prefer to be in the office more - that's good with us too.
Core skills we’re looking for to succeed in the role:
- SAS Platform Management: With in-depth expertise in SAS Platform Management (ideally 5+ years) you’ll excel in this role.
- SAS and Power BI Technical skills: You’ll showcase your proven experience of using Power BI and ThoughtSpot
- Coaching and Mentoring: You’ll be passionate about coaching others in best practices and ensuring our platforms are safe, secure, and performant
Love Data? It’s a match!
What’s involved:
- Responsible for all aspects of BI platform administration, including the definition of structures and processes for security, content, capacity, release and performance management on the environments.
- Responsible for designing and executing controls on the BI Platforms to ensure data accuracy, consistency, and reliability of timely and accurate information in reports for management decision-making purposes.
- Provide business wide BI content (Reports, Dashboards, Datasets) on a daily basis, including the timely resolution of issues, communicating effectively with all recipients of the service, and engaging in root cause analysis and incident management.
- Coach others in BI platform best practice, developing colleagues around you and contributing to a collaborative and productive team environment.
- Implement and manage appropriate governance for federated BI Self-Service across the organisation, promoting innovation within platform guardrails.
- Proactively monitor the health and performance of BI Platforms by overseeing monitoring mechanisms and be relentless in improving system performance by tuning the environments for optimal performance and platform stability.
- Contribute to the BI tooling roadmap and strategy, as we migrate to Cloud (Azure Data Platform).
- Alongside Technology Operations, proactively plan and execute the installation of software and components, apply patches and updates, and manage upgrades, backups and configuration.
- Coordinate and manage project timelines, resources, risks, and budgets to stakeholders.
- Ensure compliance with company and other relevant standards / regulations at all times (e.g. Data Security and Data Governance frameworks).
- Communicate with stakeholders to understand and meet their BI-related needs and collaborate with other IT teams to integrate BI tools with other systems and platforms.
Experience & knowledge
- Extensive hands-on platform administration experience of large-scale business wide SAS and Power BI platforms (00’s of users), in on premise and cloud environments
- Experience of delivering operational reporting and BI services in a large business environment.
- Experience of tuning, optimising and automating BI and Reporting processes.
- Extensive experience of designing and building end to end business wide BI solutions.
- Experience coaching and mentoring colleagues.
- Experience of using agile and DevOps working practices in a business intelligence environment.
- Problem solving and Incident Management – Experience troubleshooting and fixing issues in existing reports, conducting the root cause analysis and implementing preventative measures to avoid future instances.
- Stakeholder management – Experience managing stakeholders of various levels, proactively keeping them updated on multiple requests with a fast-moving set of changing priorities.
- Keen and active interest in the use of data in the wider industry, with practical knowledge and networks.
Skills
- Excellent PowerBI and SAS skills (SQL & ThoughtSpot advantageous).
- A creative problem solver who can deal with many different priorities at any one time.
- Enjoys advising, coaching and supporting others.
- Able to follow, deliver changes to improve, standards and designs, ensuring their own work, and work of others, is of high quality.
- Resilient and comfortable prioritising in demanding situations.
- Able to operate with minimal brief, and a fast-moving set of changing priorities.
- Highly trustworthy and able to operate with integrity and discretion at all times.
- Ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions.
- Energetic and proactive, and someone who motivates others by their “can do, will do” attitude.
Ready to make a positive impact? Apply now and be part of something big!
What can we do for you?
People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you’ll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in full here.
Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we’re offering, so feel free to get in touch.
