Senior Business Analyst - Contract

Stable Kernel

$156K *
Business Services
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8-10 years of analyst experience, specifically in loyalty programs.
  • Demonstrated hands-on experience in building or re-architecting customer loyalty programs, able to discuss data models and reward lifecycles.
  • Experience in consulting or professional services organizations.
  • Familiarity with engineering and data teams for AI-enabled capability designs.
  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.

Responsibilities

  • Lead discovery processes for loyalty services including rewards and promotions.
  • Map architectures of loyalty data models and identify re-architecture opportunities.
  • Partner with tech leads to negotiate vendor integrations and draft data contracts.
  • Manage a live production support channel to resolve issues effectively.
  • Facilitate team discussions to identify project gaps and risks.
  • Monitor solution health across loyalty services and implement improvements.
  • Drive best practices and mentor junior colleagues in the analytics team.

Benefits

  • Flexible hybrid work model supporting both remote and in-office engagement.
  • Travel opportunities for client interactions and team collaboration.
  • Access to ongoing learning and development resources.
  • Exposure to complex, high-impact projects in a recognized client environment.
  • Opportunity to shape the future of loyalty services and contribute to best practices.
Full Job Description
About the Role:

As a Stable Kernel Senior Systems Analyst, you will join an existing team, including other Analysts, embedded within a major national QSR client's Core Loyalty program. This is not a traditional requirements-gathering role: you will own discovery for loyalty services, lead cross-functional coordination across vendor and engineering teams, manage a live production support channel, and shape how the loyalty platform evolves through re-architecture and new integrations. Your blend of technical knowledge, systems thinking, and communication skills allows you to partner with client product owners and tech leads to define the "why" and "how"
behind complex loyalty initiatives, from build through support. Demonstrated experience building or re-architecting a loyalty program is required for this role. Senior Systems Analysts report directly to the Lead Business Analyst.

You may be classified as individual contributors or as people managers with individual contributor responsibilities.

Core Responsibilities Include:
  • Technical Impact:
    • Leading discovery for loyalty services, including redemption offers,
    promotions, loyalty rewards, and reward template management.
    • Mapping current- and future-state architectures across loyalty data models,
    integration points, and dependent services, including identifying data ownership
    ambiguities and re-architecture opportunities.
    • Partnering with tech leads and engineering teams to author data contracts
    and negotiate vendor integrations, including asynchronous/batch API patterns,
    idempotency, polling-based status checks, and vendor-specific authentication
    (SSO, API key rotation, IP whitelisting).
  • Inheriting and reconciling in-flight technical documentation, picking up active
    vendor integrations mid-stream, and working across multiple document versions
    (e.g. external vs. internal data contracts).
  • Business Alignment:
    • Understanding the client's business and loyalty program goals and using
    them to improve the definition for your team's projects.
    • Shaping scope and sequencing for complex initiatives, including defending
    boundaries with client leadership when scope pressure arises.
    • Facilitating team conversations to clearly identify gaps, risks, and
    assumptions to accurately estimate work.
    • Understanding SK's service offerings and cross-department capabilities,
    identifying organic growth opportunities, and supporting the statement of work
    process.
  • Interacting with Others:
    • Serving as a recognized point analyst for core loyalty work alongside your
    fellow analyst, fielding questions from engineering, QA, and client business
    stakeholders.
    • Leading structured working sessions with client teams including product
    owners, tech leads, vendor partners, and business operations.
    • Communicating risks, trade-offs, and scope implications with clarity while
    coordinating with dependent teams to surface upstream and downstream
    impacts.
  • Autonomy and Ambiguity:
    • Managing a live production support channel, triaging and resolving issues
    using tools such as Postman and API inspection.
    • Creating and maintaining playbooks and troubleshooting guides for client
    support teams to reduce escalation volume and enable self-service resolution.
    • Breaking down work for estimation and implementation, building structured
    epics and tickets that allow engineering teams to begin without ramp-up friction.
    • Succeeding with ambiguity, including standing up quickly on a program
    already in progress, and leading Discovery sessions that inform product roadmap
    decisions founded in data.
  • Problem-Solving:
    • Identifying and solving high-priority, complex problems and distilling them into
    short- and long-term solutions quickly and effectively.
    • Monitoring solution health across loyalty services and identifying patterns that
    warrant proactive escalation or re-architecture.
    • Recognizing and mitigating risk effectively, navigating difficult situations by
    independently finding a way forward or escalating with a possible solution.
  • Leadership:
    • Driving best practices across your project and client program, contributing
    templates, approaches, and domain insights back to the BA practice.
    • Mentoring junior and intermediate colleagues through constructive feedback,
    guidance on complex projects, and team learning sessions
  • Demonstrating strong product leadership skills, including planning,
    delegating, making critical decisions, and representing the team in client
    conversations.
  • Intimate, Working Familiarity With:
  • API testing tools such as Postman, including inspecting calls and diagnosing
    integration issues.
    • Data transformation pipelines and layered data concepts (e.g., bronze/silver/gold
    environments such as Databricks or similar).
    • Cloud, network, log, and application performance monitoring tools.
    • Vendor data contract negotiation and asynchronous/batch API integration patterns
    (idempotency, polling, status endpoints, rate limiting).
    General Requirements:
    • 8-10 years of experience as an analyst.
    • Demonstrated, hands-on experience building or significantly re-architecting a customer
    loyalty program is required. You can speak to the data model, the reward lifecycle, and
    the business trade-offs involved.
    • Experience working in a consulting or professional services organization.
    • Experience partnering with engineering and data teams to identify, design, and
    implement AI-enabled capabilities such as decisioning, automation, personalization, or
    insight generation within backend systems.
    • A bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or similar.
A Bit More Info:

Minimum Hourly Rate: $75

This is a full-time contract position.

Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to
choose where they can do their best work most days. Travel may be associated with this role as it requires you to maintain an in-office presence in a
hybrid capacity for regular in-person engagements for both clients and internal teams.

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