Lead BI Engineer

Lead Bi Engineer

Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco, CA

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.

About The Role

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.

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.

Build The Bi Foundation

• Design and implement a scalable analytics data warehouse (or lakehouse) layer on top of Altana's existing data infrastructure.
• Define the canonical dimensional model: facts, dimensions, conformed keys, and slowly changing dimensions for core business entities (customers, transactions, subscriptions, product usage, pipeline).
• Stand up and own the transformation layer (e.g., dbt) with version control, CI/CD testing, and documentation standards from day one.
• Establish a semantic/metrics layer so that "revenue," "active customer," and "retention" mean exactly one thing company-wide.

Deliver Insight At Scale

• Build and maintain executive dashboards covering SaaS metrics (ARR, NRR, GRR, expansion/contraction, logo churn), product engagement, and operational health.
• Create self-service datasets and exploration environments so that PMs, GTM leads, and finance can answer their own questions without filing a ticket.
• Own data quality monitoring, alerting, and incident response for the BI layer.

Partner Across The Business

• Act as the embedded analytics thought partner for engineering leadership, product, sales, CS, and finance—translating business context into data requirements and vice versa.
• Proactively identify trends, anomalies, and opportunities in the data; surface them before anyone asks.
• Drive alignment on KPI definitions, measurement methodology, and reporting cadences.

Set The Technical Direction

• 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.
• Write the playbook: style guides, naming conventions, PR review standards, and on-call expectations for the BI function.
• Hire, mentor, and grow the BI team as demand scales.

Qualifications

Must-Haves

• 7+ years of professional experience in analytics engineering, BI engineering, or a closely related data discipline.
• Deep fluency in SQL and at least one transformation framework (dbt strongly preferred).
• Strong dimensional modeling skills: star/snowflake schemas, conformed dimensions, incremental loading patterns.
• 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).
• Track record of defining and shipping company-wide KPI frameworks and executive dashboards.
• Comfort working in ambiguity: you have built a BI function (or a significant new workstream within one) from scratch before.
• Excellent communication skills—you can explain a data model to an engineer and a retention curve to a CRO with equal clarity.

Nice-To-Haves

• Experience with Python for data pipelines, scripting, or lightweight ML/statistical analysis.
• Familiarity with SaaS business models and metrics (ARR, NRR, logo vs. dollar churn, cohort analysis).
• Exposure to supply chain, trade compliance, or government contracting domains.
• Experience with data cataloging or governance tools (e.g., Atlan, DataHub, Monte Carlo).
• Prior experience as the first or founding analytics hire at a growth-stage company.

US salary range and benefits

$180,000- $210,000 USD

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, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible time off: Altana operates with a flexible time off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental leave: We offer industry leading paid parental leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your health savings account (HSA). There is also a flexible spending account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) savings: Save for and invest in your future using our guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our total pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee assistance program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent care FSA: You will have access to a dependent care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

Our Values

Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave. They form the foundation of Altana's culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers.

• Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable.
• Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It's how we respond when things don't go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward.
• Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we