The Role
Fair Trade USA is seeking a Data Analytics Lead (Technical Lead, Data Analytics) to play a key role in bridging business needs with data strategy and execution. This role will work closely with a small team of Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Architects, and Product Managers to drive data initiatives and ensure alignment with business objectives. This leadership role is ideal for a highly skilled individual contributor who can also act as a strategic influencer across data workstreams. The role will collaborate closely with the Product Manager for Data & Analytics to understand, align, prioritize, and drive analytical initiatives. The role requires expertise in data modeling, data warehousing, analytics, and AI-driven insights, ensuring our data ecosystem is scalable, reliable, cost-effective, and aligned with business needs.
Key Responsibilities
Leadership & Strategy
- Partner with the Product Manager to define priorities, scope work, and ensure data initiatives align with business needs.
- Serve as a technical thought leader across analytics, data science, and data engineering, helping steer work across these functions.
- Champion strong numerical analysis and research-driven data use, supporting scientific and exploratory data applications.
- Promote critical thinking and systems thinking to build scalable, accurate, and sustainable solutions.
- Identify and resolve root causes of data challenges, ensuring optimal performance and integrity across pipelines and models.
Individual Contribution & Technical Execution
- Contribute to data modeling efforts, ensuring robust data architecture, dimensional modeling, and data warehouse best practices (Redshift, S3, AWS Glue).
- Act as a hands-on data analyst, leveraging SQL, Python, ThoughtSpot, and Tableau to extract insights and deliver high-impact reports.
- Drive data engineering best practices, collaborating with the Data Architect to optimize ETL workflows and data pipelines.
- Develop and implement QA frameworks for data pipelines, analytics models, and reporting tools to maintain high standards of performance and reliability.
- Apply generative AI and automation to enhance analytics workflows, uncover insights, and improve operational efficiencies.
- Translate business needs into actionable technical solutions, ensuring analytics solutions are scalable, reproducible, and well-documented.
Collaboration & Enablement
- Support the Product Manager, to act as a bridge between business and technical teams, ensuring insights are actionable and well-communicated.
- Work closely with the Data Scientist, Data Analysts, and Data Architect to integrate data models, enhance reporting capabilities, and optimize data infrastructure for decision-making.
- Support the Data Architect and Data Analysts in optimizing warehouse design and data transformation pipelines.
- Guide Data Analysts and business users in best practices for leveraging self-service BI tools (ThoughtSpot, Tableau).
Key Competencies
- Strategic and analytical mindset with a strong ability to align data initiatives with organizational goals.
- Strong problem-solving skills, applying critical and systems thinking to data challenges.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
- Ability to work collaboratively across teams, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation.
- Commitment to Fair Trade USA’s mission and values, including sustainability and ethical business practices.
Key Qualifications / Experience
- 6+ years of experience in data analytics, data modeling, and business intelligence.
- Track record of providing hands-on technical leadership in agile environments, driving successful outcomes and team alignment.
- Expertise in data warehouse architecture and modeling, with strong knowledge of dimensional modeling, ETL best practices, and performance tuning.
- Advanced SQL skills and experience optimizing query performance across large datasets.
- Experience with ETL processes and data pipeline management using tools such as AWS Glue or similar technologies.
- Hands-on experience with self-service analytics and dashboard development using tools like ThoughtSpot, Tableau, or equivalent platforms.
- Understanding of data engineering concepts, including ETL, orchestration, and workflow automation, with knowledge and experience in designing, deploying, and monitoring analytics workloads in the cloud. Preference for experience with AWS.
- Familiarity with AI-driven analytics, particularly generative AI applications for automation and insight generation.
- Strong numerical and statistical analysis skills
- Preferred Python experience for data processing, AI integration, or automation.
- Preferred experience in sustainability or supply chain analytics.
