Senior Manager, Business Intelligence & Analytics Engineering (Remote)

Cole Haan is hiring a Senior Manager, BI & Analytics Engineering to lead the technical approach, quality and delivery of business intelligence, analytics and reporting across the company. The role leads and develops the BI engineering team, oversees SAP S/4HANA reporting stabilization and manages partner performance while working with business stakeholders and the IT PMO.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical approach: how reporting, models and data products are built, to what standard, by whom, and whether they are fit to release
• Own a named technical owner and a visible status on every active item, and surface work at risk of missing its date early and in writing rather than at the gate
• Provide level of effort and the technical resources required, as the input to portfolio planning, and be able to show the basis for an estimate when it is questioned
• Coordinate internal, offshore, contract and partner capacity against the agreed plan
• Apply direct technical depth to challenge estimates, data models, report designs and build approaches before work is committed
• Working knowledge of how AI is being applied to BI development — code and query generation, semantic layer assistance, automated testing and documentation — and judgment about where it genuinely improves delivery and where it does not
• Lead reporting and analytics engineering and stabilization for SAP S/4HANA, working with business process owners to sequence the backlog against capacity
• Ensure every reporting deliverable released has documented acceptance criteria and a reconciliation to source. No release is accepted on a walkthrough alone
• Where a reporting issue originates upstream in transactional data, master data or configuration, identify it as such, raise it with the SAP delivery organization and track it, rather than absorbing it as a reporting defect
• This role is expected to work in the platform, and the expectation is bounded by kind rather than by volume
• In scope: design and code review, solving the problems the team cannot, unblocking the critical path, prototyping, and raising the standard of what the team produces
• Not in scope: being carried on the plan as delivery capacity. Where this role becomes a named resource against committed work, the team loses its engineering leader, and the development of the team stops. That trade is made deliberately and temporarily or not at all
• Judge the work of analytics partners and contractors. Accept or reject deliverables against acceptance criteria and evidence of completed outcomes, not percentage-complete reporting
• The relationship with the offshore development partner sits with the analytics development lead in this team. This role owns the technical standard, the acceptance decision and overall partner performance, and works through that lead rather than around them
• Translate statements of work into measurable deliverables, milestones and acceptance criteria, and maintain a documented record of partner performance against commitments
• Evaluate whether the sourcing model has the right shape for the work, and bring forward a substantiated view on where capability should be added, consolidated, replaced or brought in-house — rather than working around gaps in it
• Lead, coach and develop a small team of experienced specialists who have not had an engineering leader above them. Establish clear ownership of domains, commitments, documentation and issue resolution
• Ensure each team member owns a defined domain and is the named contact the business goes to for it, building direct business relationships rather than routing through a single point
• Support workforce planning, role definition, recruiting and onboarding
• Own the analytics estate as a continuing responsibility beyond stabilization: the enhancement backlog and its sequencing against business priority, release cadence and regression discipline, data quality and platform performance
• Maintain a documented view of core measure definitions and how they are changed, so that numbers reported to the business reconcile across reports and functions
• The project manager owns the when — capacity planning across proposed and committed work, sequencing against portfolio commitments, realistic delivery timing, risks, dependencies, status reporting, stage gates, and communication with the business about dates, constraints and changes to commitments
• This role owns the what and the how — technical feasibility, solution approach, level of effort, the technical resources required, and the dependencies, risks and assumptions that bear on the plan
• Neither moves work out of a committed release, or changes what has been promised, without the other in the conversation
• This role and the team remain in the room with the business for requirements and solution playback. The project manager convenes and records those sessions but does not attend in the team’s place

Requirements:

• 8+ years in business intelligence, analytics, data or technology delivery
• 3+ years leading technical teams, including senior individual contributors and partner resources — with evidence of having developed people, not only directed work
• Hands-on depth in data modeling, semantic layers, SQL and reporting design — sufficient to specify, review and validate work rather than relay it
• Demonstrated ownership of the technical execution and quality of enterprise reporting, with a record of accurate estimates and early risk signaling
• Experience delivering reporting on an ERP platform, preferably SAP, including reporting stabilization after a major implementation
• Retail and wholesale process understanding across merchandising, inventory, order management and finance — sufficient to interrogate a data model, not simply recognize the terms
• Demonstrated management of partner and contractor performance against statements of work, including rejecting deliverables that did not meet criteria
• Experience coordinating distributed, offshore and contract development resource
• Credibility with functional leadership and senior stakeholders — able to hold a position on delivery matters, including when the position is unwelcome
• Footwear, apparel or accessories brand experience; or an adjacent sector with a comparable retail and wholesale model
• Snowflake, Tableau, Power BI, SAP BW, Fivetran, Alteryx or comparable platforms
• Experience establishing data definition standards and governance practice with business functions
• Exposure to AI enablement for analytics