Senior Specialist - Business Intelligence

//Revised //

JOB DESCRIPTION SUMMARY

The Senior Specialist - Business Intelligence is a hands-on individual contributor responsible for owning, delivering, and supporting enterprise Business Intelligence solutions, with a strong focus on Power BI, data modelling, and analytics delivery.

This role acts as a key interface between business stakeholders, data engineering teams, and external vendors—translating business requirements into high-quality dashboards, reports, and data products.

The Senior Specialist - Business Intelligence is accountable for BI platform ownership, operational support, documentation, and end-to-end delivery of analytics initiatives, ensuring solutions are reliable, scalable, and aligned with departmental objectives and overall corporate goals.

The role requires strong analytical capability, disciplined documentation practices, and the ability to independently manage multiple priorities across day-to-day BI operations, enhancements, and new analytics projects.

KEY DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

BI Platform Ownership & Operations

• Act as the BI platform owner, responsible for responsible for datasets, workspaces, refresh schedules, security, performance, and adoption of the BI environment (primarily Power BI).
• Oversee day-to-day BI operations, including service desk requests, incident management, bug fixes, and enhancements.
• Ensure BI solutions adhere to data governance, security, and quality standards.
• Manage BI releases, deployments, and production support activities.

Hands on BI Delivery & Project Management

• Design, develop, and maintain Power BI dashboards, reports, and semantic models, ensuring high performance, accuracy, and usability.
• Manage BI projects end-to-end including scope, timelines, dependencies, risks, and delivery milestones.
• Own delivery of new BI use cases, from requirements gathering through development, testing, and production release.

Requirements & Solution Design

• Engage directly with business stakeholders to collect, define, and document business requirements.
• Translate business needs into functional requirements, wireframes, and specification documents for approval.
• Design KPI frameworks, metrics definitions, and data models aligned with business objectives.
• Maintain structured documentation, including meeting minutes, requirement documents, decision logs, and delivery trackers to ensure clarity, accountability, traceability, and continuity across BI initiatives.

Stakeholder & Business Engagement

• Partner with Heads of Departments to align data analytics initiatives with business objectives and corporate goals.
• Support senior stakeholders and internal committees with daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting and analytical insights.
• Proactively identify insights, trends, and data gaps to improve decision-making
• Act as a trusted advisor on data interpretation, KPI definitions, and performance measurement.

Vendor & Project Coordination

• Coordinate deliverables from external vendors and managed service providers, providing clear requirements and feedback.
• Manage vendor relationships, including scope definition, delivery oversight, performance tracking, and issue resolution.
• Conduct thorough testing and validation of vendor deliverables to ensure accuracy, quality, and usability before business sign-off.

Data Engineering & Data Marts

• Build and enhance data pipelines (directly or in collaboration with data engineering teams).
• Design and create subject-specific data marts to support scalable and reusable reporting.
• Validate data sources, transformations, and outputs to ensure consistency and reliability.

EDUCATION & SKILLS

1. Proactive, self-starter, professional and presentable; confident and prepared to engage in meetings and stakeholder discussions
2. Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, or similar
3. Proficiency in English (written and verbal)
4. Proficiency in Arabic (preferred)
5. Excellent communication and presentation skills, able to engage effectively across all levels (from vendors to internal data providers and senior stakeholders)
6. Relevant technical certifications in data modelling, database design and development, data mining, or segmentation techniques (preferred)
7. Strong motivation to continuously learn and adopt new analytics techniques and tools (preferred)
8. Ability to work effectively and responsibly without close supervision
9. Keen interest in technology with a strong desire to understand and learn business processes (preferred)

EXPERIENCE & KNOWLEDGE

1. 6+ years of experience in Business Intelligence /Data visualisation, Analytics, or Data Reporting roles, with at least 2+ years in a lead or manager capacity.
2. Strong hands-on experience with Power BI (data modelling, DAX, performance optimization, deployment best practices).
3. Experience with DAX and enterprise semantic model design
4. Experience working with databases across cloud and on-prem environments (e.g., Serverless SQL, Oracle, SQL Server) (preferred)
5. Working knowledge of Python for analytics or data pipelines
6. Proven experience managing BI projects and analytics vendors in a structured delivery environment.
7. Experience in banking or financial institutions, with exposure to financial data, regulatory environments, and risk-related reporting
8. Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts, data modelling, and analytics architecture.
9. Experience managing BI or analytics projects (scope, timelines, dependencies, stakeholders)
10. Hands-on experience with the Microsoft Azure Data Stack (ADLS Gen2, Synapse, Data Factory, Power BI)
11. Experience working with Databricks (preferred)
12. Knowledge of statistics and experience using statistical packages for analysing large datasets (Excel, SPSS, SAS) (R/ Python) (preferred)
13. Experience integrating data from MS Dynamics or similar enterprise systems (preferred)
14. Experience with additional BI tools (e.g., Holistics, MicroStrategy, Tableau, Pentaho) (preferred)
15. Experience with PySpark (preferred)
16. Knowledge of statistics and statistical methods; experience with statistical packages (preferred)

ABILITIES & SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS

1. Strong ability to work as a hands-on individual contributor, owning delivery end-to-end
2. Ability to manage multiple and varied tasks and work effectively under pressure to meet deadlines and targets
3. Ability to take concise notes and meeting minutes.
4. Strong analytical thinking and structured problem-solving skills
5. Ability to translate business questions into data models and BI solutions
6. Strong attention to detail with disciplined documentation and follow-through.
7. Excellent attention to detail, particularly around data accuracy and validation
8. Ability to work independently and effectively with minimal supervision while remaining accountable for outcomes
9. Strong stakeholder communication skills, influencing without formal authority
10. Ability to collaborate effectively with data engineers, IT teams, and vendors
11. Ability to proactively identify issues, propose solutions, and drive closure
12. Comfort operating in ambiguous or evolving requirements environments
13. Mentoring and coaching ability to develop BI team capabilities (preferred)