First things First: Who are we?

Twice the size of our next largest competitor, First Student is the leading school transportation solutions provider in North America. Every day, we complete 5 million student journeys, moving more passengers than all U.S. airlines combined. With a team of highly trained drivers and the industry’s strongest safety record, First Student delivers reliable, quality services including full-service transportation and management, special-needs transportation, route optimization and scheduling, maintenance, and charter services for 1,100 school district contracts.

The Director of Data & Analytics role is to focus on strategic development and operations of the data & analytics practice, including managing staffing requirements, optimizing processes and technology, ensuring a high availability BI/data warehouse and Lakehouse platform, providing ongoing data integrations, and delivering insights and advanced analytics. The Director of Data & Analytics will work closely with business executives and stakeholders in other departments to identify, recommend, develop, implement, and support analytics solutions to deliver essential information to satisfy their information needs.

Responsibilities

• Strategy & Planning: Responsible for the development and refinement of the Data and Analytics short term and long term strategies. Ensures alignment with the First Student Business and Technology Strategies. Work with different business units at the Director/VP/SVP level to align the business and IT.
• Govern: Envision, design, and implement a Data Governance program in partnership will all business unit stakeholders. Deliver and enable data self-serve environment with proper guardrails. Develop data standard definitions, products, catalogs. Define standards we should adopt to ensure data quality, integrity, and trustworthiness.
• Function Management: Develop, track, and control the Data and Analytics annual operating and capital budgets for purchasing, staffing, and operations. Lead, hold accountable, recruit, develop, retain, and organize of Data and Analytics team in accordance with corporate budgetary objectives and personnel policies. Managed 3rd party service providers.
• Engage: Promote analytics program, products and services. Work with stakeholders to define business and systems requirements for new information technologies, particularly in the areas of BI, analytics, cloud stored data and data warehousing, lakehouse, virtual warehouse.
• Modernize: Provide thought leadership and delivery in the modernization of the Data and Analytics environments including Cloud consolidation and Master Data Management.
• Research & Development: Facilitate system feasibility studies, proof of concepts, pilot project, and testing. Design and Engineer reuse of data resources across different business units. Conduct research and remain current with the latest data technologies and solutions in support of future data management procurement efforts. Develop requests for proposal.
• Deliver: Oversee the delivery of business focused BI dashboards and data serving digital applications. Coordinate within IT and business to ensure delivery quality. Manage supply and demand of BI resources vs. Project requests.
• Operate: Ensure effective improvement, monitoring, maintenance, operation, change management, incident and problem resolution for a high availability, 24/7, North American environment. Oversee all reports, dashboards, and information artifacts. Develop, implement, and maintain all key BI and data management policies and procedures, including those for BI/EDW/Lakehouse architecture, data centers, standards, purchasing, monitoring, and service provision. Examine, refine, and develop BI metrics.
• 3-4 days/week in HQ office located in downtown Cincinnati
• Potential 15% travel time required.
• Due to time zone difference and appropriate meeting times, US Eastern Time zone work hours are required.

Position Requirements

• University degree in the field of computer science or information systems or business administration and 10+ years related work experience.
• MBA is an asset.
• Proven experience in building and managing virtual off-shore teams.
• Strong technical knowledge of data management systems, data warehousing methodology, data lakehouse concepts, virtual data warehouse, data quality, data modelling, data governance, MDM, analytics, and predictive modeling.
• Strong technical knowledge of current data management trends, including ETL, ELT, zero ETL.
• Extensive knowledge of SQL.
• Extensive knowledge of AWS Data and Analytics services, including S3, DMS, Glue, EMR, DynamoDB, RDS, Redshift, Kinesis, Sagemaker.
• Proven experience in BI/data warehousing planning and development.
• Proven experience in infrastructure and staff.
• Excellent understanding of the organization’s goals and objectives.
• Experience in successfully using project management tools to execute large scale global projects. Strong understanding of project management principles.
• Strong understanding of human resource management principles, practices, and procedures.
• Strong written and communicational skills in English.
• Excellent interpersonal skills.
• Stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices in data management, data analytics, and machine learning.
• Ability to communicate to the business community.
• Ability to conduct and direct research into IT issues and products as required.
• Ability to present ideas in business-friendly and user-friendly language.
• Proven experience developing business cases and departmental budgets.
• Good business judgment.
• Highly self-motivated and self-directed.
• Keen attention to detail.
• Proven analytical, evaluative, and problem-solving abilities.
• Ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.
• Exceptional customer service orientation.
• Extensive experience working in a team-oriented, collaborative environment.

First for a Reason

• Community Service & Impact

Go where opportunity meets community. Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. As the face of First in your community, you’ll have a positive impact on others.

• Extensive Training

Build skills and knowledge in such areas as safety and security, injury prevention, technology and equipment, and job efficiency.

• Professional Advancement

Start here. Go far. We believe in promoting from within … which means tremendous opportunities for you, thanks to our strong presence across North America. In addition, our 18-month Aspiring Manager Program prepares future leaders at First.

• Diversity & Inclusion

Because we’re stronger together, we aspire to have a culture where all people are First. We’re committed to providing an inclusive and diverse working environment for everyone every day.

• Benefits

We offer competitive compensation and benefits, including physical and mental health initiatives, medical/dental/vision, 401(k), and paid holiday/vacation.

Apply today and get your career on the road with First Student!

We aspire to have a culture where all people are First. We strive to attract and retain a diverse workforce therefore all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status. First is also committed to providing a drug-free workplace. For candidates applying to positions in San Francisco or Los Angeles California, First will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or Los Angeles Fair Chance Ordinance. First is an equal opportunity employer and by doing so we will sustain and promote an inclusive culture that supports future growth for all.