Lead Analytics Consultant

Role Purpose

The Strategic Data & Analytics team builds the analytical products that support growth across Howden Employee Benefits. We are a business-embedded team that works directly alongside consultants, client directors and project teams, rather than operating within a traditional technology or IT function. Our products are used every day by colleagues across the UK business and by our clients to support better decision-making, solve complex challenges and deliver stronger outcomes.

This role builds those products. You will own delivery end to end, and lead the reusable components, frameworks, templates and working practices that allow a small team to serve the whole business. Our approach is simple: build fewer things, build them fast, and build them once so they can be used many times.

This is not a software engineering role and it is not an IT role. We are a consulting team that is proficient with technology. You will spend as much time working out what a senior leader actually needs to decide as writing the code that answers it.

Location is flexible, with home-based or local Howden office-based both available according to preference. The team itself is distributed across home and several Howden offices and works together primarily over Teams rather than in one room. Our closeness to the business is organisational rather than geographic.

Key Accountabilities

• Work directly with senior leaders and client-facing colleagues to turn a broad commercial question into a defined, decidable one, and to turn the answer into a product rather than a one-off analysis.
• Own delivery of analytical products end to end, from first conversations through to something in production that real users depend on.
• Lead the development of the reusable components, libraries, frameworks, templates and working practices the rest of the team builds on.
• Build for reuse and hand-off: configurable, documented and maintainable by someone other than you.
• Work within the firm's software development lifecycle and governance requirements, and help shape them where they do not yet fit how a small product team works.
• Support the technical development of colleagues, including reviewing their work. This is not a line management role.
• Keep delivery momentum when priorities move, which they will.

Skills & Experience

The first question is whether this is the right environment for you.

• You have a consulting mindset and enjoy working across a wide variety of problems.
• You enjoy helping senior leaders and their teams make better decisions, and you see data, analytics and visualisation as your tools for bringing that about.
• You can explain technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• You support the people around you, in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges. You share what you learn, you would rather have an honest conversation than a comfortableone, and you build your own network across the business. In a small team we succeed together, and nothing we build succeeds unless the business succeeds with it.
• You take ownership of your decisions, your actions and your outputs.
• You are comfortable with uncertainty and speed, and are interested rather than frustrated by new problems with incomplete and ambiguous information.
• You can work in a fast-growing firm where processes, systems and structures are still being brought together, and where parts of the environment are incomplete.
• You are effective in a distributed team. Most of our collaboration, with each other and with the business, happens over Teams, with colleagues you will meet in person occasionally rather than daily. If you do your best work by turning to the person beside you, this will be a difficult environment.

Technical experience:

• You have taken more than one analytical product from an incomplete brief through to sustained use by people who did not commission it. Delivery matters to us more than cleverness.
• You have built the reusable parts that colleagues then worked from, and you have lived with what you built after release: supported it, changed it under pressure, and let that change how you build next time. This would not be your first role building analytical products.
• You have substantial experience building analytical products in Python. Our stack is Python, Shiny for Python, Quarto, git, Azure DevOps for repositories, pipelines and artifacts, with Docker-based deployment and Terraform. We expect real experience of many of these, or of close equivalents such as R and Shiny, the tidyverse, Streamlit, Dash, or scientific and quantitative computing. We do not expect all of them.

You must be able to build without AI coding agents. We do not use them for coding. You will read, write, debug and review code yourself, and be able to explain all of it. If any material part of how you work today depends on agent-assisted or "vibe" coding, this is not the role for you, and we would rather you knew that before applying.

Experience of Employee Benefits, Pensions or Insurance is not required.