Senior Data Engineer

Job Summary

Swiss Re is a leading provider of Life and Health (LH) reinsurance. We are looking for a Senior BI Engineer / BI Solution Architect to shape the technical direction of our Valuations Modelling analytics landscape. You will own the end-to-end architecture of BI and analytics solutions built on Microsoft Power BI, Oracle, and Azure/Fabric services, and set the standards that our globally distributed engineering community follows.

This is a senior technical leadership role. You will act as a trusted advisor to actuarial and IT stakeholders, drive complex multi-squad initiatives, remove architectural roadblocks, and coach the next generation of BI engineers. You will balance long-term platform strategy with hands-on delivery of the most challenging technical problems.

Responsibilities

• Architect design: own the reference architecture for BI and analytics across the Valuations Modelling landscape - semantic layer strategy, Oracle data model, Azure/Fabric integration patterns, security model, and deployment topology.
• Lead requirement gathering: partner directly with senior actuarial and business stakeholders to elicit, challenge and shape requirements; translate ambiguous business needs into clear, engineerable solution designs and roadmaps.
• Set technical standards: define and enforce best practices for Power BI semantic modelling, DAX, Power Query, Oracle SQL / PL/SQL, source control, CI/CD, testing, documentation and code quality.
• Solve the hardest problems: personally lead the design and implementation of the most complex or performance-critical components - large tabular models, high-volume Oracle procedures, incremental refresh strategies, composite / DirectQuery / aggregation designs, RLS/OLS at scale.
• Performance scalability: own end-to-end performance - from Oracle execution plans, indexing, partitioning and PL/SQL tuning, through data movement, to Power BI VertiPaq storage, DAX query plans, and Fabric/Premium capacity management.
• Platform strategy: evaluate and pilot new Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Azure and Databricks capabilities; drive the migration and modernization roadmap; make build-vs-buy and cost-vs-value recommendations.
• Governance control: design auditable, controlled reporting solutions aligned with regulatory, SOX and internal audit requirements; own data lineage, security, and access governance for the BI estate.
• Delivery leadership: guide multiple squads through the Agile delivery lifecycle in Azure DevOps - backlog shaping, estimation, design reviews, code reviews, release management, and post-release hyper-care.
• Operations reliability: ensure the BI estate is production-grade - monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, incident and problem management aligned with ITIL practices.
• Mentorship community: coach senior and junior engineers, run technical guilds, brown-bag sessions and design clinics; grow a strong BI engineering community across locations.
• Stakeholder enablement: advocate for "design to report" upstream; champion visualization best practices; enable self-service analytics where appropriate while protecting the trusted core.

About the team

We are a large, globally distributed team with actuarial and IT stakeholders working together in an agile development environment. We deliver solutions that calculate reserves for Swiss Re s Actuarial Reserving Unit.

Our landscape processes large volumes of data and relies on automation, coordination, visualization, control, and auditing. The systems include in-house solutions across multiple cloud platforms and integrations with industry-leading actuarial modeling software.

As a team member, you will learn how enterprise-scale analytics solutions are built, supported, and continuously improved.

About you

Your knowledge:

• Bachelors degree in computer science / engineering is required; Masters in Engineering / Business is preferred.
• 13+ years of professional experience, with a strong track record in enterprise BI, data engineering and analytics architecture, ideally in insurance, reinsurance, banking or another regulated industry.
• Power BI - expert / architect level: deep expertise in tabular semantic modelling, advanced DAX (calculation groups, query plans, storage vs. formula engine tuning), Power Query / M, incremental refresh, aggregations, composite and DirectQuery models, dataflows, deployment pipelines, workspace governance, RLS/OLS, XMLA endpoints, Tabular Editor scripting, DAX Studio and VertiPaq Analyzer.
• Oracle - expert: advanced SQL and PL/SQL, complex packages, procedures, functions, triggers, cursors, bulk operations, partitioning, materialized views, analytic functions, execution plan analysis, index and hint strategies, and performance tuning on multi-terabyte datasets.
• Data architecture: dimensional modelling, semantic layers, lakehouse patterns, medallion architectures, master data and reference data management, data quality and lineage.
• Cloud modern data platform: Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory / Synapse, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric (OneLake, Warehouse, Lakehouse, Direct Lake), and integration patterns between on-prem Oracle and Azure/Fabric.
• DevOps engineering practice: Git, Azure DevOps pipelines, branching and release strategies, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing for data and BI artefacts.
• Programming / scripting: proficient in Python (and ideally PySpark) for data engineering, automation and tooling.
• Actuarial projection / valuation modelling tool knowledge (Prophet, RAFM, AXIS, etc.) is a strong plus.
• Microsoft Data / Power BI / Azure certifications (e.g. PL-300, DP-500/DP-600, DP-203, AZ-305) are a plus.
• Excellent spoken and written English, with the ability to communicate confidently at senior stakeholder and executive level.

Your personality

• You have a strong wish to work in a globally distributed team, and you bring senior technical leadership together with a genuine "can-do" attitude.
• You are highly analytical and structured, with the curiosity, creativity and critical thinking to challenge the status quo constructively.

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.