OUR STORY:

Ulta Beauty is the largest specialty beauty retailer in the United States and the place for the true beauty enthusiast who gets butterflies as she shops for beauty and experiments throughout our store. We are the only one to provide our guests prestige, mass and salon products and services under one roof – All Things Beauty, All in One Place™. We put our guests at the center of all we do, committing to offer her unrivaled ways to be beautiful in an environment that provides the thrill of exploration and delight of discovery.

POSITION SUMMARY:

The Lead IT Analyst is an integral and important role for Ulta Beauty’s big data journey.  Ulta Beauty is a data driven, customer-centric business at all levels of the organization and leverages the rich data to drive the business.   The Lead IT Analyst is the link between Ulta Beauty’s data program and its business objectives.

The Lead Analyst has significant responsibilities related to developing, solutioning, supporting and leading multiple BI (Business Intelligence) / analytics initiatives and systems. The Lead Analyst provides direction to other members of the team (including onshore and offshore consultants), to ensure successful delivery of both business and technical capabilities. The Lead Analyst will work with stakeholders across the company and related third parties to define and document business processes and software requirements for various initiatives. The Lead Analyst will evaluate and validate new and existing functions, identify and analyze end-user issues and provide support through standardized processes, tools, workflow analysis and testing to ensure end-user requirements are fulfilled.

CORE JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Business Process Improvement: Analyzes business processes; evaluates alternative solutions, assesses feasibility, and recommends new approaches, typically seeking to exploit technology components. Develops business requirements for the implementation of significant changes in organizational mission, business functions and process, organizational roles and responsibilities, and scope or nature of service delivery.
• Configuration Management: Applies tools, techniques and processes to track, log, report on and correct configuration items, components and changes related to the configuration items.
• Data Analysis:  Applies data analysis, data modeling, and quality techniques, based upon a detailed understanding of business processes, to establish, modify or maintain data structures and associated components. Liaises with database engineers and other application development team members on the details of data structures and associated components.
• Development Testing: Coordinates and manages planning of the system and/or acceptance tests, including software security testing, within a development project.  Takes responsibility for the management of all testing activities within a development or integration project.  Manages all risks associated with the testing and takes preventative action when any risks become unacceptable.  Initiates improvements to test processes and directs their implementation.  Manages client relationships with respect to all testing.
• Relationship Management: Develop a strong partnership and collaboration with business partners performing as a team member who consults on attaining the BI goals by leveraging enterprise data.  Reviews the communications needs of each stakeholder group in conjunction with business owners and subject matter experts. Translates communications / stakeholder engagement strategies into specific tasks.  Contributes to the development and enhancement of customer and stakeholder relationships.
• Requirements Definition: Leads scoping and business priority-setting for change initiatives. Evaluates and selects the most appropriate means of representing business requirements in the context of a specific change initiative, ensuring traceability back to source. Manages requests for and the application of changes to base-lined requirements. Identifies the impact on business requirements of interim scenarios as well as the required end position.
• Service Acceptance: Engages with technical design, service owners, and/or PMO to ensure correct products are produced, in a timely fashion.  Assesses the quality of project outputs against agreed service acceptance criteria.

ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design an evolving information data model for analytics that will support the corporate reporting requirements. Continously enhancing and documenting BI and Data Designs and Standards based on new learnings, new capabilities and functionality that is used by the different ULTA business units.
• In-depth experience in design and build of a business data layer, semantic layer to support the business community in working with EDW data 
• Maintain a deep knowledge of SQL and relational databases.
• Assist partner IT teams to be able to deliver analytical and data needs in a timely and accurate manner, while still adhering to the ULTA BI and data standards.
• Guide the power/end users within deployments leveraging self service analytics within the data ecosystem to meet their analytical needs.
• Champion the design and development of analytics solutions that can be reusable across deployments and for new technologies or solutions and have an efficient delivery mechanism.
• Investigate, define and setup for the deployment of new capabilities in Business Intelligence, which includes extending BI Self Service with emphasize on Tableau and SAP BOBJ tools
• Ability to facilitate and conduct gap analysis, develop functional specifcations and understand all phases of project life cycle.
• Is a proactive thought leader expected to stay up to date on BI functionality and advancements and make recommendations regarding improvements to processes and procedures.

Requirements

REQUIREMENTS FOR CONSIDERATION:

• BS in Computer Science or related field and/or equivalent experience

• 5+ years of strong data warehouse experience with data extraction, transformation and loading and leading development
• Proven command of SQL
• Experience with data modeling, mining, mapping, and monitoring.
• Experience in multiple BI and visualization tools which include Business Objects, Tableau etc.
• Experience in SAP HANA Analytics or GCP Google Big Query a plus
• Experience conducting peer design and architecture reviews
• Passion for learning new technologies and eagerness to collaborate with other creative minds
• Experience in Retail, CPG or Logistics domain preferred
• Must be proactive, self-directed, detailed and organized with the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously
• Experience conducting root cause analysis
• Demonstrated success in influencing cross-functional teams/stakeholders and using enterprise thinking when making decisions
• Excellent communication (written and verbal) skills and leadership skills
• Minimum travel required (training/conferences)