Senior Specialist: Data Insights

We’re Hiring: Senior Specialist: Data Insights | Data and Analytics

Are you an experienced data analytics professional with a passion for delivering complex insights and driving data-informed decision-making?

Lesaka Merchant is looking for a Senior Specialist: Data Insights to join our Merchants Operations Division. This role is ideal for a highly analytical individual who can lead complex analytical workstreams, develop insight frameworks, and contribute to advancing analytics standards across the business.

Job purpose

To deliver structured, high-quality analytical work that enables the business to understand performance, merchant behaviour, product economics, and operational dynamics, while proactively identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies in complex datasets to support operational and strategic decision-making, and producing clearly communicated analyses, data extracts, and insight narratives that inform decisions and contribute to the standards and knowledge base of the analytics function.

Key Responsibility Areas

Complex analytical workstreams delivered

• Lead delivery of complex analytical workstreams such as cohort analyses, trend investigations, root cause analyses, merchant segmentation, and performance deep-dives.
• Work from requirements defined in collaboration with the Business Advisory team to ensure alignment to business needs.
• Translate business questions into structured analytical approaches and robust methodologies.
• Explore and interrogate large, complex datasets to uncover drivers of performance and behaviour.

Reusable analytics frameworks and reports delivered

• Develop and maintain reusable analytical frameworks and datasets that enable the team to answer recurring business questions efficiently and consistently.
• Produce clear, well-structured analytical outputs – summaries, data packs, and narrative reports – that accurately represent findings and are accessible to non-technical readers.
• Proactively monitor key business metrics and surface anomalies, trends, and emerging patterns before they are raised as questions by stakeholders

Stakeholder Insights delivered

• Collaborate with Business Advisory to contextualise insights and prepare them for stakeholder playback.
• Work with BI teams to operationalise insights into dashboards and ongoing monitoring views.

Data Insight specialists mentored and data practice methodologies optimised

• Provide practical mentorship and peer review to Specialist: Data Insights colleagues, raising analytical quality and methodological rigour across the team.
• Contribute to the team's analytical standards, documentation practices, QA procedures, and approach to statistical rigour.
• Develop a deep understanding of the business domain, product economics, customer lifecycle, risk and performance metrics, and share this knowledge actively within the team.

Qualifications & Experience

✅ Required

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative or analytical discipline – Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Economics, Information Systems, or similar. Postgraduate qualification advantageous.
• 6+ years of experience in data analytics, business analysis, or a closely related role, with a strong track record of delivering complex, open-ended analyses independently.
• Advanced SQL: able to construct multi-step analytical queries across complex schemas in a cloud data warehouse environment.
• Strong analytical thinking: demonstrated ability to decompose ambiguous business questions into structured, methodologically sound analytical approaches.
• Experience producing written analytical outputs, summaries, reports, data packs, that communicate findings clearly and credibly to non-technical audiences.
• Familiarity with at least one BI or data visualisation tool for supporting the communication of analytical findings.
• Solid experience working within a governed data environment (defined data models, semantic layers) rather than ad-hoc extraction.

Key Competencies

• Analysing and forming opinions
• Accuracy
• Devotion to Quality
• Results Oriented
• Cooperation
• Providing feedback
• Creativity
• Advanced Data Analysis and Modelling – Apply statistical and analytical techniques to generate actionable business insights
• SQL and Analytical Programming (Python/R) – Extract, transform, and analyse complex datasets to support decision-making
• Data Visualisation and Insight Communication – Develop clear presentations and effectively communicate insights that influence business outcomes
• Metrics Design and Performance Measurement – Define, structure, and monitor key business and product performance indicators
• Data Quality and Governance – Ensure consistency, reliability, and integrity of data used across reporting and analytics

Ready to deliver impactful data insights at Lesaka Merchant?

Apply now or share this opportunity with a colleague who would be a great fit.

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