Technical Lead – Data Office

Knight Frank is the leading independent property consultancy in the UK offering agency and professional advice across Commercial, Residential and Rural sectors. Established in 1897, Knight Frank now comprises a global network of over 400 offices.

The Data Office within Knight Frank has been growing rapidly over the last year and an opportunity has arisen for a Head of BI to come in and lead the BI Team and advance our automation and reporting capabilities across a multi-functional organisation.

Working as part of the Data Leadership team you will set the vision for expanding our MS Azure environment and identify priorities and set the road map for supporting the business with it’s data and reporting needs.

The right candidate will need to be a self-starter, highly motivated, have natural leadership qualities and gravitas and be prepared to interface with all departments to gather the support required. The environment is extremely varied and fast paced so you’ll need to be comfortable juggling multiple priorities.

Responsibilities

Strategy and Vision

• Determine how the Business Intelligence team sources, gathers, maintains, and deploys data and analytics across the organisation
• Build and maintain a strategy for the data vision including a roadmap to show progress made
• Determine the organisations business goals and objectives that focus on data and align the strategy to deliver each goal
• Work with the Head of Data to deliver the Vision and Champion BI to influence other business leaders to accept and adopt ideas and data solutions
• Understand the key performance indicators that drive business decisions, using reporting and analytics across Business Services and the wider business across Residential & Commercial

Management

• Ability to attract, hire and retain the best BI and Data Engineering talent.  Provide Leadership, motivate, and manage the Business Intelligence team, ensuring delivery of objectives and development of team members
• Ensure the team is operating in the most effective way possible and have the appropriate level of skills and capabilities to be successful
• Identify training & skills gaps, areas with no secondary support, growing and improving the BI architecture or adopting new tools and work with the Group Head of Data to ensure that appropriate investment levels are fed into the future budget
• Work with the other Data Leaders to advise on all aspects of data, security management and provide support to meet the Data Office’s joined up goals
• Work with the wider IT and PMO teams to ensure provision of Business Intelligence services are being managed and resources are being correctly applied

Technical Operations

• Provide leadership on overall MS Azure Technical architecture to support the Business Intelligence strategy
• Be proficient in all aspects of BI, Data and Analytics technologies and architectures, including:
  • BI and Data architecture for the traditional data warehouse and modern Azure Data platform
  • BI delivery mechanisms, such as portals, internal & external dashboards, and mobile BI
  • BI tools including Power BI Premium and Qlik
  • Dimensional and Tabular data modelling principles (star and snowflake schemas, denormalised data structures, slowly changing dimensions, etc)
  • ETL techniques and Data integration tools such as SSIS, Azure Data Factory and Alteryx workflows
• Advise the BI team and ensure processes are in place to comply within the boundaries of the BSI ISO 27001 Audits

Agile Project Management

• Ensure all areas of the team have adopted the teams preferred Agile way of working and follow the principles of SCRUM
• Ensure the tools meet the ongoing needs of the teams Agile framework
• Oversee planning and execution of each sprint
• Work with the team to continuously improve the development process through regular reviews and retrospectives
• Prioritise the business objectives and set clear goals across all areas within the team

Experience

• Bachelor's Degree in a STEM or related field
• At least 4 years' experience in a data leadership role & overall experience of around 8-10 years
• Demonstrable knowledge of agile, Devops/ Dataops methods of working
• Data and BI: Strong Data Warehousing implementation knowledge as well as a knowledge of multiple database environments as well as a range of analytical and BI/Visualisation tools
• Deep understanding of data modelling and traditional / modern data warehouse architecture
• Strong understanding of the Microsoft stack
• Management of data teams experience essential
• Project management skills
• Ability to lead Data Engineering teams and DBAs whilst managing business stakeholders
• Knowledge of relevant applications, data solutions, and tools.
• Comfortable working in a fast changing, dynamic environment
• Strong communication, influencing and stakeholder management skills
• Strong delivery capability – able to get things done, and perform under pressure
• Strong commercial knowledge and real estate knowledge desirable

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Send CV to: Urvashi.Shukla@knightfrank.com