Principal Data Analyst

DC Thomson are recruiting for a Principal Data Analyst to join our central Data Science & Analytics Team in either London, Dundee or Glasgow. The successful candidate will work across our well-known brands and products such as FindMyPast, British Newspaper Archive and others.

During a time of digital transformation, the Data Science & Analytics Team have received support and investment to promote a data driven culture across the business.

This is an opportunity to work across all the DC Thomson brand portfolio while providing advanced analytical support to Product, Editorial, Commercial, Marketing, Finance and Technology. In time, this role can progress into a more senior Individual Contributor role or alternatively, a Line Manager role. Furthermore, the team benefit from allocated days for career growth to attend conferences and industry events.

The History Team covers The British Newspaper Archive and FindMyPast, family and social history companies with a mission to empower people to discover and share stories from the past. With billions of historical records and a passionate community, we're building tools that make research easier, more rewarding, and more engaging for both hobbyists and experienced researchers across B2C and B2B products. The Principal Data Analyst will strengthen analytical capability in a portfolio organisation facing increasing market pressure and rapidly evolving audience behaviours. This role ensures the business can interrogate, interpret and operationalise data to improve commercial performance, customer value and strategic alignment. The successful candidate provides analytical oversight, standardises best practice and builds data literacy across teams while ensuring insights support revenue growth, efficiency and innovation.

Key Responsibilities include:

• Analytical Leadership & Quality Assurance - Ensures analytical outputs meet required standards of accuracy, clarity and commercial relevance.

• Insight Delivery & Commercial Impact - Produces analysis and models that drive measurable improvements in revenue, efficiency or customer outcomes.

• KPI Stewardship & Measurement - Maintains and evolves KPI frameworks ensuring consistency and alignment across the organisation.

• Stakeholder Partnership & Influence - Translates complex findings into actionable insights, influencing decision-making and securing alignment.

• Best-Practice Development - Builds analytical maturity by standardising processes and developing analyst capability.

• Innovation & Methodology Improvement - Identifies opportunities to improve analytical methods, tooling and automation.

Skills & Experience

Required:

• Strong SQL coding language skills

• Visualising data in Looker

• Modelling data in dbt

• Analytical activities, ensures quality insights and applies complex techniques to support decision-making.

• Contributes insight to strategic plans and supports evidence-based decision-making.

• Coaches analysts and supports skills development.

• Aligns analytics with enterprise data models and standards.

• Builds strong relationships, ensuring clarity and mutual understanding of analytical outputs.

Desirable

• Snowflake data warehouse experience / exposure

• Python programming language skills

Behaviours that will help this role succeed:

• Being More Curious - Actively explores data trends and challenges assumptions.

• Experiment with Purpose - Tests new analytical methods to improve insight speed and quality.