Digital Analytics Engineer (Instrumentation)

Who are we?

Sanlam was established as a life insurance company in South Africa but has since transformed into a diversified financial services group that operates across the African continent, India, Malaysia and selected developed markets, with listings on the Johannesburg, A2X and Namibian stock exchanges.

In 2018 the Group celebrated its centenary as well as 20 years since demutualisation and listing in South Africa and Namibia. Sanlam is one of the largest internationally active insurance groups in the world with a presence in 31 countries and has the biggest non-banking financial services footprint on the African continent.

The Group's five business clusters (Sanlam Fintech x, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz and Santam) house the Group's business operations. The Group Office provides strategic direction and support to the five clusters, assisting them in realising their strategies and meeting their business objectives.

The Group Office is responsible for governance and for the Group's centralised functions, which include: Finance, Actuarial and Risk Management, Strategy, Human Resources, Market Development and Sustainability.

Position Overview

The Digital Analytics Engineer (Instrumentation) is a hands-on technical leader responsible for designing, implementing, and governing the end-to-end measurement infrastructure across Sanlam Fintech’s digital products.

This is primarily a Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) specialist role — bridging the gap between the business stakeholders who need reliable data and the engineering teams who build and maintain the digital platforms that produce it.

At this level you will own the analytics tagging architecture, define event tracking standards, lead the adoption of server-side tagging, and mentor less experienced analysts and developers on measurement best practice.

What will you do?

Tag Management and Tracking Implementation

• Own and govern all Google Tag Manager (GTM) containers across web and mobile properties including workspace management, version control and deployment governance.
• Design and implement client-side and server-side GTM configurations including custom JavaScript variables, custom templates and Consent Mode v2 integrations.
• Implement and maintain GA4 event tracking aligned to a consistent organisational event schema including custom dimensions, custom metrics and ecommerce measurement.
• Instrument complex single page applications, micro frontend architectures and hybrid mobile web views where standard auto tracking is insufficient.
• Manage third party marketing and analytics pixels through GTM ensuring accurate conversion tracking and deduplication.

Measurement Strategy and Data Layer Architecture

• Define and maintain the organisation-wide data layer event taxonomy including naming conventions, event schemas and parameter standards for all product teams.
• Design scalable tagging architectures that are privacy-compliant, performant and resilient to platform changes.
• Develop and maintain a measurement planning process that translates business questions and KPIs into concrete tracking specifications before development begins.
• Lead the design of A/B testing and experimentation measurement frameworks ensuring experiments are tracked consistently and results are statistically sound.
• Evaluate and recommend analytics and tag management technologies as the market evolves.

Data Quality and Governance

• Proactively audit existing tracking implementations to identify gaps, duplication and data quality issues and own a prioritised tracking backlog.
• Build and maintain automated QA processes including pre launch validation checklists, regression test suites and post deploy monitoring dashboards.
• Write advanced SQL queries against GA4 BigQuery exports to validate event data, detect anomalies and produce data quality reports.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation including tagging specifications, data layer contracts, GTM container changelogs and measurement plans.

Reporting and Insights Enablement

• Build and maintain reporting dashboards in Looker Studio that surface actionable product and marketing insights for stakeholders.
• Partner with Data Engineering and Data Science teams to ensure analytics event data flows reliably into downstream pipelines.
• Translate complex measurement findings into clear non-technical narratives for product owners, marketers and senior leadership.

Privacy and Compliance

• Design and implement tracking architectures that comply with POPIA, GDPR and Sanlam's internal data governance policies.
• Own the integration between the Consent Management Platform and GTM ensuring tags fire only under the correct consent conditions using Consent Mode v2.
• Lead privacy-by-design reviews for new tracking implementations and advise product teams on data minimisation approaches.

Technical Leadership and Mentorship

• Define and drive best practices for event design, data layer architecture and tagging governance across the organisation.
• Provide technical mentorship to junior analytics specialists and front-end developers on tracking implementation, debugging and data quality standards.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives that raise overall measurement maturity through workshops, internal guides and championing a data quality culture.
• Represent the analytics engineering function in product squads, architecture reviews and vendor evaluations.

Qualification And Experience

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in digital analytics implementation, web analytics engineering or a closely related measurement discipline.
• Expert-level proficiency with Google Tag Manager including custom templates, JavaScript variables, server-side container configuration and Consent Mode v2.
• Expert-level knowledge of Google Analytics 4 including event and parameter configuration, exploration reports and BigQuery integration.
• Strong JavaScript skills with experience writing custom tracking code and debugging via browser developer tools.
• Solid understanding of web fundamentals including HTML, DOM structure, single-page application lifecycle and mobile web view constraints.
• Advanced SQL skills — comfortable querying GA4 event data in BigQuery or equivalent cloud data warehouses.
• Demonstrated experience designing and governing an organisation-wide event taxonomy and data layer standard.
• Practical experience with server-side tagging including GTM server container setup, custom clients and conversion API integrations.
• Strong understanding of privacy regulations (POPIA, GDPR) and experience implementing consent-aware tracking architectures.
• Experience leading technical initiatives, mentoring less experienced practitioners and influencing cross-functional teams.

Advantageous

• Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) or Google Tag Manager certification.
• Experience with additional analytics platforms such as Adobe Analytics, Contentsquare, PostHog or Heap.
• Familiarity with CDP or event streaming tools and their integration with analytics pipelines.
• Exposure to A/B testing and feature flagging platforms.
• Experience in a regulated industry where data governance and audit trails are non-negotiable.
• Relevant degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics or equivalent practical experience.

What will make you successful in this role?

• Measurement Rigour: You are obsessive about data quality. You know that a broken tag leads to a broken decision and you treat your tracking implementations with the same care as production code.
• Business Context: You connect every tracking implementation back to a business question. You can explain in plain language why a metric matters and what action it should drive.
• Privacy-First Mindset: You balance the need for rich behavioural data with genuine respect for user privacy and regulatory obligations.
• Systematic Debugger: You approach tracking issues methodically using browser dev tools, GTM Preview, GA4 DebugView and network request inspection to isolate root causes quickly.
• Cross-Functional Collaborator: You work comfortably across Product, Engineering, Marketing and Data Science teams. You write clear specs, run effective workshops and translate technical constraints for non-technical audiences.
• Automation Mindset: You invest in tooling and process including automated QA, documented standards and reusable GTM templates so the measurement ecosystem scales without becoming a manual bottleneck.

Knowledge And Skills

Provides strategic input in building future, world class IT engineering technical capabilities

Shapes the future IT landscape and leads the engineering transformation journey in the organisation

Leads the efforts of developing engineering and management best practices, metrics and sound audit practices.

Management and coaching of employees

Industry trends and market changes

Personal Attributes

Balances stakeholders - Contributing strategically

Builds effective teams - Contributing strategically

Manages complexity - Contributing strategically

Tech savvy - Contributing strategically

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping our employees to realise their worth.

Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Core Competencies

Being resilient - Contributing strategically

Collaborates - Contributing strategically

Cultivates innovation - Contributing strategically

Customer focus - Contributing strategically

Drives results - Contributing strategically

Turnaround time

The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers.

Our commitment to transformation

The Sanlam Group is committed to achieving transformation and embraces diversity. This commitment is what drives us to achieve a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace as we believe that these are key components to ensuring a thriving and sustainable business in South Africa. The Group's Employment Equity plan and targets will be considered as part of the selection process.