Lead BI Engineer

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p>Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.</p></div><h1><strong>About the Role</strong></h1> <p>You will be the founding BI Engineer at Altana, responsible for building the analytical infrastructure that enables data-driven decision-making across the entire company. This is not a reporting role that sits downstream of decisions already made—it is a foundational engineering role that will define how Altana understands its own business, customers, and products.</p> <p>You will own the full stack from data modeling and pipeline orchestration through semantic layers, dashboards, and self-service tooling. You will partner directly with engineering, product, go-to-market, and finance leadership to translate ambiguous business questions into reliable, well-modeled data products. Because you are the first hire in this function, you will also set the technical direction, tooling choices, and quality standards that future BI engineers will inherit.</p> <h1><strong>What You Will Do</strong></h1> <h2><strong>Build the BI Foundation</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Design and implement a scalable analytics data warehouse (or lakehouse) layer on top of Altana’s existing data infrastructure.</li> <li>Define the canonical dimensional model: facts, dimensions, conformed keys, and slowly changing dimensions for core business entities (customers, transactions, subscriptions, product usage, pipeline).</li> <li>Stand up and own the transformation layer (e.g., dbt) with version control, CI/CD testing, and documentation standards from day one.</li> <li>Establish a semantic/metrics layer so that “revenue,” “active customer,” and “retention” mean exactly one thing company-wide.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Deliver Insight at Scale</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Build and maintain executive dashboards covering SaaS metrics (ARR, NRR, GRR, expansion/contraction, logo churn), product engagement, and operational health.</li> <li>Create self-service datasets and exploration environments so that PMs, GTM leads, and finance can answer their own questions without filing a ticket.</li> <li>Own data quality monitoring, alerting, and incident response for the BI layer.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Partner Across the Business</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Act as the embedded analytics thought partner for engineering leadership, product, sales, CS, and finance—translating business context into data requirements and vice versa.</li> <li>Proactively identify trends, anomalies, and opportunities in the data; surface them before anyone asks.</li> <li>Drive alignment on KPI definitions, measurement methodology, and reporting cadences.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Set the Technical Direction</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Evaluate and recommend the BI tooling stack (visualization, orchestration, cataloging, observability) with an eye toward total cost of ownership and long-term maintainability while re-using infrastructure and tooling already part of the larger stack.</li> <li>Write the playbook: style guides, naming conventions, PR review standards, and on-call expectations for the BI function.</li> <li>Hire, mentor, and grow the BI team as demand scales.</li> </ul> <h1><strong>Qualifications</strong></h1> <h2><strong>Must-Haves</strong></h2> <ul> <li>7+ years of professional experience in analytics engineering, BI engineering, or a closely related data discipline.</li> <li>Deep fluency in SQL and at least one transformation framework (dbt strongly preferred).</li> <li>Strong dimensional modeling skills: star/snowflake schemas, conformed dimensions, incremental loading patterns.</li> <li>Production experience operating a modern lakehouse stack (e.g., Snowflake/BigQuery/ Databricks),  including transformation tooling (dbt or DLT) and a BI layer (Looker, Tableau, or Sigma).</li> <li>Track record of defining and shipping company-wide KPI frameworks and executive dashboards.</li> <li>Comfort working in ambiguity: you have built a BI function (or a significant new workstream within one) from scratch before.</li> <li>Excellent communication skills—you can explain a data model to an engineer and a retention curve to a CRO with equal clarity.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Nice-to-Haves</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Experience with Python for data pipelines, scripting, or lightweight ML/statistical analysis.</li> <li>Familiarity with SaaS business models and metrics (ARR, NRR, logo vs. dollar churn, cohort analysis).</li> <li>Exposure to supply chain, trade compliance, or government contracting domains.</li> <li>Experience with data cataloging or governance tools (e.g., Atlan, DataHub, Monte Carlo).</li> <li>Prior experience as the first or founding analytics hire at a growth-stage company.</li> </ul> <p><strong>US Salary Range and Benefits</strong></p> <p>$180,000- $210,000 USD</p> <p>The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position.  The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills,…