Practice Lead - Business Intelligence

Practice Lead, Business Intelligence

We exist to make it simpler for Kiwi businesses to look after their people. We're known as the simple way to sort your payroll for over 20,000 businesses. Our slick software combined with our awesome support team help businesses pay their people on time, accurately and in line with legislation. As a fast-growing FinTech expanding into adjacent markets, Smartly offers a fast paced, fun work environment with great opportunities for personal and professional development.

We're looking for a Practice Lead, Business Intelligence to build and lead Smartly's BI and analytics engineering practice.

This is a senior player–coach role for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strong leadership and product thinking. You'll be responsible for setting the standards, architecture, and operating model for how metrics, reporting, and self‑service analytics work at Smartly, while remaining hands-on and delivering meaningful individual contribution.

Your work will sit at the heart of how Smartly makes decisions: improving trust in metrics, enabling faster and better product and commercial decisions, and creating a reliable, scalable self‑service analytics experience used confidently across the organisation.

You'll partner closely with the Data Engineering and Data Science Practice Leads to ensure governance, quality, and delivery practices are aligned, operating as distinct crafts, but one data team.

Practice & People Leadership

• Build, lead, coach, and mentor a high-performing BI and analytics engineering team.
• Set clear standards for quality, ways of working, and career development within the BI practice.
• Lead recruitment, onboarding, and capability development as the practice grows.
• Run practice rituals such as technical reviews, semantic and metric reviews, and learning sessions.

BI & Analytics Engineering Leadership

• Own the end-to-end health of Smartly's BI assets: semantic models, curated datasets, dashboards, and critical reporting.
• Lead the evolution of Smartly's self-service analytics environment, balancing accessibility with governance and reliability.
• Own and continuously improve the BI platform experience (including tooling, governance, permissioning, performance, and adoption).
• Define and enforce conventions for metrics, dimensions, naming, and modelling so analytics remains consistent as Smartly scales.
• Set modern analytics engineering expectations and bring them to life through hands-on leadership (version control, testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices).

Analytical & Delivery Leadership

• Champion metric clarity and shared definitions so teams speak a common language of performance.
• Raise the bar for how insights are communicated — clear, actionable, and tied to real operational and commercial outcomes.
• Partner across Product, Engineering, Commercial, and Leadership teams to enable confident, data-informed decision-making.
• Coach stakeholders to use self-service analytics responsibly and effectively.

Governance & Operational Excellence

• Establish and maintain governance for BI assets, including ownership, risk tiering, and lifecycle management.
• Embed strong security and reliability practices for business-critical metrics and dashboards.
• Ensure production BI assets meet clear standards for monitoring, change management, and operational readiness.

Experience & Technical Capability

• 5+ years' experience in business intelligence, analytics engineering, or advanced analytics roles.
• Proven experience building and operating a scalable semantic layer with trusted metric definitions.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with Python in analytics or data environments.
• Experience using modern analytics engineering practices: source control, code review, testing, and CI/CD.
• Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms and warehouses (Azure preferred).
• Experience administering and governing a BI platform (Metabase or similar).

Leadership & Ways of Working

• Experience leading, mentoring, or managing BI or analytics practitioners.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, able to translate complexity into clarity and influence decisions at senior levels.
• Pragmatic, outcome-oriented mindset with high standards for quality and reliability.
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where priorities evolve.

If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you. Please apply with your CV and a brief cover letter outlining why this role interests you.