Who is the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra?
Known for its artistic excellence for more than 130 years, today the PSO is the region’s national and international cultural ambassador. A two-time 2018 GRAMMY® Award-winning orchestral ensemble credited with a rich history of concerts, performances, and recordings with the world’s finest conductors and musicians, the PSO consistently demonstrates a genuine commitment to Pittsburgh’s citizens, regional communities, and vibrant cultural scene. The internationally acclaimed Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) engages audiences of all ages through unparalleled live musical experiences, community collaborations, and educational programming that enrich every life with great music.
Job Purpose:
The Director of Analytics and Insights is the primary business-facing member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's BI function and the senior analytical voice within the team.
This role is the primary support to departments while they translate organizational goals, department needs, and business language into consistent, well-defined KPIs, dashboards, and analyses across all departments. The Director runs intake conversations with department heads, facilitates metric definition sessions, proactively surfaces insights, and translates business requirements into technical specifications the BI team can act on.
As PSO transitions from foundational data infrastructure into an era of trusted, organization-wide performance monitoring, the Director sets the standard for the practice; ensuring every KPI has a single agreed-upon definition, every dashboard answers a real business question, and the function matures with clarity and discipline.
As the BI function grows in scope and staff, this role will grow with it, with the potential to lead a small team of analytical and data professionals and to expand in scope and title as the function matures.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Business Partnership & Stakeholder Engagement (Primary Focus)
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Serve as the primary point of contact between the BI function and business departments, including Marketing, Development, Programming, Guest Experience, Finance, Education, and Operations.
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Run structured intake conversations that translate department objectives and milestones into scoped, actionable BI work.
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Facilitate metric definition sessions with metric owners to establish clear, agreed-upon KPI definitions before development begins.
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Help non-technical stakeholders articulate what they need from data, reframing vague requests into answerable ones.
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Present dashboards, findings, and a BI portfolio review at a regular cadence to departments and leadership in language appropriate to the audience.
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Lead data literacy initiatives that strengthen the organization's ability to interpret and act on analytical outputs.
KPI & Metric Stewardship
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Own the organization-wide metric definition practice, ensuring terms like "new patron," "active donor," "revenue," and "engagement" have a single agreed-upon definition across the organization.
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Maintain the Metric Registry as the single source of truth for KPI definitions, including formula, grain, owner, cadence, source, and sensitivity classification.
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Apply the "So What?" test to every proposed KPI, and enforce OCS discipline (Owner, Cadence, Source) before metrics enter the plan.
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Classify metrics by type (Input, Output, Performance, Financial Driver) to ensure each department has a healthy mix of leading and lagging visibility.
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Steward the ongoing evolution of KPIs; retiring, refining, or proposing metrics as business needs change.
Requirements Translation & BI Delivery
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Convert business requirements into clear, well-specified technical requirements that the Data Engineer and BI team can act on.
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Reconcile data across multiple source systems to produce consistent, trustworthy analytical outputs.
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Partner with the Data Engineer on data model decisions that support business needs.
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Maintain and enhance the existing portfolio of dashboards, reports, and segmentation logic, ensuring outputs remain accurate, documented, and refreshed on schedule.
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Triage incoming BI requests, apply scoring criteria and quality gates, and ensure outputs comply with data governance, privacy, and security standards.
Proactive Analysis & Insight Delivery
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Perform hypothesis-driven analyses of patron behavior, ticket sales, fundraising, membership dynamics, marketing effectiveness, and organizational health.
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Identify trends, anomalies, and opportunities that departments have not surfaced themselves, and communicate findings on a regular cadence.
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Frame insights in terms of the decision they inform, the recommended action, and the level of confidence; not raw data dumps.
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Partner with department heads to help them use BI outputs to change how their work is done.
Team & Practice Development
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Mentor department staff who perform analyses, elevating analytical capability across the organization.
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Contribute to the design and eventual staffing of the growing BI function.
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Provide informal technical guidance to peers and cross-functional collaborators.
Required Education and Experience:
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Bachelor's degree in Analytics, Data Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Business, Economics, or a related field. Equivalent professional experience may substitute.
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Ten or more years of progressive experience in business intelligence, data analytics, business analysis, or a related discipline, with demonstrated growth in scope and responsibility.
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Demonstrated experience leading stakeholder engagements — running requirements gathering sessions and translating business language into technical specifications.
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Demonstrated experience defining and stewarding KPIs or metric definitions across multiple business functions, including bringing agreement across competing definitions.
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Strong hands-on experience with modern BI and dashboarding platforms, including semantic modeling, data visualization design, and communicating with business users about report design.
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Working proficiency with SQL for exploratory analysis, validation, and specification.
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Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a proven ability to explain data and findings clearly to non-technical audiences.
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Strong customer-service orientation and comfort in ambiguous, evolving business conversations.
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Interest in and aptitude for eventually leading a small team of analytical professionals as the function grows.
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Ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams and deliver on commitments with minimal supervision.
Preferred Skills and Experience:
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Experience with modern cloud data platforms and Lakehouse or warehouse architecture.
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Familiarity with dimensional modeling and metric registry design.
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Familiarity with CRM, ticketing, or fundraising platforms (Tessitura experience is a plus).
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Experience supervising, mentoring, or coaching analysts or other technical practitioners.
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Working knowledge of a scripting language (such as Python or R) for analytical prototyping.
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Experience supporting marketing analytics, fundraising analytics, or executive KPI frameworks.
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Familiarity with data governance and stewardship practices.
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Experience in a nonprofit, arts, cultural, or mission-driven organization.
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Demonstrated curiosity — an inclination to investigate the "why" behind numbers, not just report them.
Physical Requirements:
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Ability to work at a computer for extended periods of time.
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Ability to operate standard office equipment including computer, copier, and scanner.
Compensation and Location:
This is a full-time exempt position with an annual salary between $115,000 - $123,000 depending upon experience. We also offer a comprehensive benefits package which includes paid holidays, paid time off, employer paid health benefits, as well as retirement savings options with an employer match. Heinz Hall in downtown Pittsburgh is the work location for this position. The PSO supports a flexible, hybrid work environment, which currently includes three days per week in-person work, including occasional work on weekends and evenings during PSO and Heinz Hall concerts or events.
Pittsburgh Symphony, Inc. (PSI) provides equal opportunity to all qualified employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, veteran status, or any other class or category protected by local, state, or federal law.
The specific statements shown in each section of the description are not intended to be all-inclusive. They represent typical elements and criteria considered necessary to perform the job successfully.
The PSI recognizes that an individual with a disability may require a job modification/accommodation to enable them to successfully perform a job function. Consideration will be given to such requests. Such requests should be directed to Human Resources.
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