Data Analyst

Overall Ambition

Nando’s is on a journey to Create Lasting Happiness, making a difference to the lives of our people, our customers, and the communities we work in. Originally started in Johannesburg, South Africa, we pride ourselves on creating memorable experiences for everyone involved in Nando’s: from our employees, communities, founders, and suppliers, but most importantly, our customers.

Whilst we always look back on our history and story with pride, the story is still evolving. We have recently been growing our digital capabilities to ensure the Nando’s experience remains relevant to modern-day customers.

You will be joining a tech team that has grown rapidly in the past five years and is determined to enable change within the restaurant industry by bringing innovative thinking and the latest technology tools and practices to solve some of its most complex problems.

The Data and Analysis Team

We are seeking an experienced Data Analyst to join our Data and Analysis team. Our remit is to ensure everyone has access to the right information, at the right time, and that Nando’s gets the best value out of our data to achieve our business goals.

Our current focus is extracting insights from the data and creating a single source of accurate, timely data as we continue to increase our data maturity and advance our predictive analytic capability and explore the role of AI in the business.

You will be part of our work to support our strategic goals and build a data-informed attitude for addressing our opportunities and challenges.

Our Values

At Nando’s, our values guide how we work, make decisions, and show up for each other every day:

• Pride – We take pride in everything we do, from the quality of our food to the impact of our work.
• Passion – We bring energy, enthusiasm, and a love for what we do.
• Courage – We speak up, challenge the status quo, and are not afraid to try new things.
• Integrity – We do the right thing, act honestly, and build trust with each other.
• Family – We care for and support one another, creating a sense of belonging where everyone can thrive.

What we're looking for:

As a Data Analyst you will work across a wide range of domains from financial and operational data, to kitchen tech and stock, helping our teams make better decisions grounded in sound analysis. As a curious problem-solver, you will be able to move between the technical and the commercial; and be comfortable building data models as well as presenting findings to senior stakeholders.

In this role you’ll work independently across the full data stack, understanding the ‘why’ behind requests before jumping to the ‘what’, and contributing to the translation of business problems into well-defined, actionable work. You’ll be supported by a collaborative team and won’t be expected to deliver everything solo from day one, but you’ll be expected to grow into doing so.

You will…

• Write and maintain SQL models (in Dataform) to transform and serve reliable data across our pipelines
• Support data engineers in the design, building and testing of data pipelines, able to contribute meaningfully, not just consume the output
• Build and iterate on cloud-based reports and dashboards in Looker (or similar BI tool), giving our support teams and restaurants clear, actionable insight into performance
• Translate business questions into well-scoped analysis and understand the problem and domain before reaching for the answer
• Communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, choosing the right medium for the audience
• Peer review colleagues’ work and contribute to data quality standards and documentation
• Identify opportunities to automate manual processes and data tasks, and take the initiative to implement them

Skills required

• You will have proven experience in the following:
• Writing complex SQL to query, transform and model data across our cloud data platform (window functions, CTEs, complex datatypes)
• Building and maintaining data models in Dataform, or a similar data transformation tool such as Snowflake or DBT, with an understanding of how they fit into the broader pipeline
• Building reports and dashboards in Looker or a similar BI tool, serving reliable, self-serve data to the business
• Using Git as standard practice — branching, pull requests and code review
• Contributing to the translation of business requests into clearly scoped, actionable work items
• Applying data quality techniques — writing tests, identifying issues proactively and communicating data limitations clearly
• Documenting data models, definitions and lineage to a production standard
• Understanding data governance principles and championing good data management practice within the team
• Applying and understanding when to use relevant statistical methods to support analysis
• Supporting data engineers in designing, coding and testing data processing pipelines
• Using AI-assisted coding tools (e.g. Claude) to improve the speed and quality of your work — critically, not blindly — with an awareness of responsible AI use and data governance implications

You will also display

• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, able to explain complex findings in plain language and tell the story behind the data
• Genuine intellectual curiosity, actively exploring new tools and methods, including AI, and sharing what you learn with the team
• Comfort with ambiguity, able to define the right question and find the “so what” before jumping to answer
• A product mindset, understanding the business objective behind every piece of analysis, not just the request on the surface
• A proactive approach to improving processes, data quality and ways of working, with the initiative to make it happen, not just flag it
• A collaborative team attitude, peer reviewing others’ work, sharing knowledge and contributing to a stronger team

Inclusion

At Nando’s, everyone is welcome. Inspired by our Southern African heritage we know and value the richness that diversity brings to Nando’s. We’re committed to creating an inclusive and respectful culture for all; including our existing and future Nandocas, partners and suppliers, customers and the communities we are a part of. We deliberately work hard to create an environment where every individual is valued, respected and can flourish regardless of who they are, their background or outlook on life.

We welcome applications from a diverse range of individuals and will consider any reasonable adjustments in order to enable candidates to perform as well as possible during the recruitment process.