Data & Analytics Lead

Location:

Southern California

The Opportunity

A growing, technology-driven specialty insurance organization is seeking a hands-on

Data \& Analytics Lead

to build its data infrastructure and analytics capabilities from the ground up.

This is an opportunity to own the data foundation, establish trusted reporting, and turn operational data into actionable business intelligence. Reporting directly to the company's founder and collaborating with technology leadership, you will be responsible for architecture, data modeling, pipelines, governance, security, and analytics delivery.

This is a builder role-not a position focused on overseeing others or reviewing dashboards. You will write SQL, develop models, troubleshoot pipelines, and establish the standards that support the company's continued growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the data foundation: Design and develop a data warehouse or lake integrating internal systems with external data sources, including partner APIs, vendor feeds, and performance data.
• Establish trusted metrics: Create standardized, documented definitions for key business metrics and develop governed, self-service reporting.
• Develop analytics and reporting: Leverage existing Azure and Power BI infrastructure while evaluating tools and technologies that best support business needs.
• Integrate data into applications: Enable teams to access actionable insights within existing operational platforms through embedded reporting or APIs.
• Identify risk and performance trends: Develop alerts to identify changes in loss frequency, severity, and performance across carriers, shipping routes, commodities, and partners.
• Lead external delivery resources: Provide clear technical specifications, direct offshore analysts and engineers, review deliverables, and maintain quality standards.
• Maintain data security and governance: Implement access controls, data masking, environment separation, and audit trails to protect sensitive information and support ongoing SOC 2 compliance.
• Plan strategically: Sequence development priorities to establish a reliable foundation before advancing into more sophisticated analytics and predictive capabilities.

Required Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building a data warehouse or lake, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and data modeling.
• Experience integrating internal operational data with external sources, vendor feeds, or partner APIs.
• Demonstrated ability to build governed metrics, semantic layers, certified datasets, and self-service reporting models.
• Experience delivering data into applications through embedded reporting or APIs in partnership with engineering teams.
• Strong SQL skills and practical Python experience, with the ability to contribute directly from day one.
• Experience directing contractors or offshore technical resources, including writing specifications and reviewing work.
• Hands-on implementation of sensitive-data security controls, including access management, masking or tokenization, and audit trails.
• Strong technical judgment, problem-solving skills, and the ability to prioritize foundational work in an evolving environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in insurance, shipping, logistics, parcel, or supply chain environments.
• Familiarity with policy and claims data, loss ratios, loss frequency and severity, carrier performance, or subrogation.
• Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL, Power BI, or Fabric experience. Comparable experience with Snow -- flake, BigQuery, or Databricks is also valuable.
• Exposure to fraud analytics or predictive modeling is a plus, but production machine learning experience is not required.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first 6-18 months, you will establish trusted business metrics, improve reporting accessibility, integrate internal and external data, implement actionable loss-trend alerts, and build a secure, scalable foundation for future predictive analytics.

Longer term, this foundation will support more advanced risk insights, including evaluating potential shipping risks before a shipment is in transit.

Compensation \& Work Arrangement

The base salary range is

$120,000-$180,000

, depending on experience and location.

Southern California candidates are strongly preferred, with hybrid attendance approximately monthly and additional in-person collaboration as needed. Exceptional remote candidates will be considered, with quarterly onsite visits covered by the company and substantial overlap with Pacific Time working hours expected.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, age, color, sex (including pregnancy), religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, military status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable laws or regulations.

GPAC (Growing People and Companies) is an award-winning search firm specializing in placing quality professionals within multiple industries across the United States since 1990\. We are extremely competitive, client-focused and realize that our value is in our ability to deliver the right solutions at the right time.