Senior Analytics Engineer

External Applicants: Please ensure all required documents are ready to upload before beginning your application, including your resume, cover letter, and any additional materials specified in the job description. Cover Letter and Supporting Documents: Navigate to the "My Experience" application page. Locate the "Resume/CV" document upload section at the bottom of the page. Use the "Select Files" button to upload your cover letter, resume, and any other required supporting documents. You can select multiple files. Important Note: The "My Experience" page is the only opportunity to attach your cover letter, resume, and supporting documents. You will not be able to modify your application or add attachments after submission. Current Employees: Apply from your existing Workday account in the Jobs Hub. Do not apply from this website. A cover letter is required for all positions; optional for facilities, campus services, and hospitality roles unless otherwise specified. Job Description Summary We are a small team of analytic practitioners inside Information Systems, and we serve the entire university — academic units, enrollment, advancement, finance, HR, and student life. Some weeks that means sitting with a stakeholder to shape how their data should be structured. Other weeks it means building the pipeline, the model, and the dashboard end to end. Nobody on this team hands work over a wall. You will meet the stakeholder, understand the problem, design the solution, build it, and stay with it through adoption. If that scope sounds like a lot, it is — and it's the reason the work is interesting. We are also in the middle of a genuine platform shift. We're moving from a legacy reporting estate toward a modern lakehouse architecture on AWS and Microsoft Fabric, and replacing low-code integration with spec-driven development in Python. Alongside that, we're early in our AI journey — deliberately so. We have projects scoped and moving forward now, and we're working out what AI actually changes about this craft, from AI-assisted engineering through to agentic analytics for our stakeholders. We're not promising you a mature AI practice to plug into. We're offering something better: a chance to help build one. What we offer ● A small team where your work is visible and your judgment matters ● Room to shape a platform migration rather than maintain a finished one ● Real support for learning — training, certification, and time to explore new tools ● Flexibility in how you work: hybrid by default, with roughly one day a week on campus ● The breadth of a university: no two stakeholder problems look alike Job Description Partner with the institution ● Work directly with stakeholders across campus to understand their questions before defining a solution — requirements gathering is a conversation, not a ticket. ● Advise on data architecture, data management, and governance practices for units building their own capability. ● Coach and support customers through implementation and adoption. Service is a core part of this job, not an afterthought. Build the solutions ● Design and develop data pipelines, models, and analytic products spanning our source systems — Workday (SIS, Finance, HCM) among them. ● Write the SQL that does the heavy lifting: complex, performant, and readable enough that the next person can maintain it. ● Build and tune curated data layers in AWS Lake Formation/Athena and Microsoft Fabric, and deliver reporting through Power BI and other analytic tools. ● Own solutions through the full lifecycle — discovery, design, build, test, deploy, support, iterate. Modernize the platform ● Help move our integration work from SnapLogic toward spec-driven development in Python using AI-assisted tooling. ● Contribute to decisions on our future warehouse direction, including evaluation of Redshift and Snowflake. ● Help retire legacy reporting (Cognos) responsibly, without disrupting the people who depend on it today. ● Take on AI projects as we scope them, and help us separate what genuinely improves our work from what only looks like it does. Additional Job Description Required Education, Knowledge, Skills, Abilities: ● Five or more years of hands-on experience building a data warehouse, data pipeline, or analytics solutions in a professional setting. ● Strong SQL. This is the non-negotiable one — the ability to write, debug, and optimize complex queries against large datasets. ● Working proficiency in Python, or clear evidence you can get there quickly. ● Experience with a cloud data platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and modern warehouse or lakehouse patterns. ● Experience building reports and dashboards in a modern BI tool (Power BI, Tableau, Cognos, Looker, or similar). ● The ability to translate between technical and non-technical audiences — and the patience to do it well with people who are not data professionals. ● A self-starter's instinct: you can pick up an ambiguous problem, ask good questions, and make progress without being handed a task list. ● Genuine interest in learning technologies you haven't used yet. ● A bachelor's degree. We're open on the field of study — we've seen strong analytics people come from music, philosophy, and biology as often as from computer science. Preferred Education, Knowledge, Skills, Abilities: ● Experience with Workday, particularly Prism or Reports ● Higher education experience, or experience with student, finance, or HR data domains ● Microsoft Fabric, AWS Lake Formation, or Athena ● Integration platform experience (SnapLogic, Informatica, Fivetran, dbt, Airflow) ● Practical experience applying LLMs or AI agents to engineering or analytics work ● Data governance, data quality, or master data management experience Accountabilities: Individual contributor who works as part of a team, applying established standards and developing their skills. Receives guidance and direction from senior team members and management on more complex tasks *This position is not eligible for sponsorship of non-immigrant or immigrant visa status through Wake Forest University. All eligible applicants are encouraged to apply. Time Type Requirement Full time Note to Applicant: This position profile identifies the key responsibilities and expectations for performance. It cannot encompass all specific job tasks that an employee may be required to perform. Employees are required to follow any other job-related instructions and perform job-related duties as may be reasonably assigned by his/her supervisor. In order to provide a safe and productive learning and living community, Wake Forest University conducts background investigations and drug screens for all final staff candidates being considered for employment. Equal Opportunity Statement The University is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes all qualified candidates to apply without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, genetic information, disability and military or veteran status. Accommodations for Applicants If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, please contact AskHR@wfu.edu or (336) 758-4700. About WFU: Wake Forest University, formed in 1834, has experienced decades of growth and innovation. WFU is a distinctive university that combines a liberal arts core with graduate and professional schools and innovative research programs. The University embraces the teacher-scholar ideal, which prizes the personal interaction between students and faculty. It is a place where exceptional teaching, fundamental research and discovery, and the engagement of faculty and students in the classroom and the laboratory are paramount. Wake Forest University is a community that seeks the enlightenment and freedom which come through diligent study and learning. Its higher goal, however, is to give life to the University motto "Pro Humanitate," as members translate a passion for knowledge into compassionate service. The community shares a tradition that embraces freedom and integrity and acknowledges the worth of the individual. The heritage, established by the school's founders and nurtured by succeeding generations, promotes a democratic spirit arising from open-mindedness and discourse. Wake Forest fosters compassion and caring for others. Its collective strength and character are derived from the values and distinctive experiences of each individual; therefore, it affirms the richness of human intellect and culture and its contribution to knowledge, faith, reason, and dialogue. Furthermore, it strives toward a society in which good will, respect, and equality prevail. To that end, Wake Forest University rejects hatred and bigotry in any form and promotes justice, honor, and mutual trust. The University is comprised of: the undergraduate college, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, School of Business, School of Divinity, School of Law, and School of Medicine (located on the Bowman Gray campus with Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center) and today enrolls about 4,846 undergraduates and 2,823 students in graduate programs at its principal location, the Reynolda campus. Students at Wake Forest University enjoy a great deal of access to and interaction with world-class faculty both in and out of the classroom setting with a student-faculty ratio of 11:1. Wake Forest employs approximately 2,772 full and part-time faculty and staff. Wake Forest is a collegiate university offering a vibrant, intellectual community with a rich cultural life, an impressive array of facilities, and a strong athletics program competing in the fifteen-team Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Since its founding, the university has adopted the motto “pro humanitate,” which is exemplified by a deep institutional commitment to public service and engagement with the world. Wake Forest has a strong commitment to holistic, eight-dimensional well-being for students, faculty and staff as evidenced in the Thrive initiative. Winston-Salem, North Carolina Wake Forest is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a beautiful, mid-sized city centrally located in the Piedmont-Triad region of North Carolina. Winston-Salem is a family-friendly city with high quality schools, numerous outdoor recreational activities and events, and is known for its vibrant and thriving arts scene. Winston-Salem residents enjoy close proximity to the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains (1.5 hours) and Atlantic beaches (4 hours), a moderate climate with four distinct seasons, a very reasonable cost of living, and an eclectic variety of restaurants, wine bars, and breweries for dining with friends and family. Winston-Salem offers many of the amenities of a large city but with the sense of community and quality of life of a smaller town.