About the Role:This is a hands-on, relationship-first systems analyst role built on a solid technical foundation. You are the person who turns priorities into well-organized, actionable work, keeps engineers supplied with a clear pipeline, and moves quickly between teams to gather context and unblock decisions. You are credible enough to hold a working conversation with engineers, curious enough to learn a new domain fast, and organized enough that the people around you can focus on their highest-value work. Your differentiating value is being visible, responsive, and trusted by the team you sit with every day.
Our client has brought its Quality Engineering team into Platform Engineering alongside an Architecture focus, forming three pods that operate as one team. The Jira projects are being combined, support and communication channels are merging, and ceremonies are being unified while each pod keeps its own refinement. The Quality Engineering pod has built a meaningful portfolio of testing and quality capabilities, including test data services, quality gates, performance testing, and ephemeral environments, and it now needs the same organized, well-fed delivery rhythm as the rest of the team.
As a Stable Kernel Senior Systems Analyst, you will be the right hand to the client's Platform Engineering Product Owner and the engineering leads. You will manage and maintain the combined team backlog, lead or support refinement across pods, translate needs and decisions into clear work items, and keep enough contact with stakeholders that questions get answered in hours rather than weeks. You will work across all three pods rather than being dedicated to a single one, and you will build a high-level understanding of what each is doing so you can route detailed questions to the right engineer.
This role will report directly to our Senior Systems Analyst Practice Lead.
What Success Looks Like:The vision: three pods working as one team, with a backlog that is always organized, refined, and ready, so engineers never have to go looking for their next piece of work and senior leaders can spend their time on discovery, advocacy, and direction rather than backlog upkeep.
The Senior Systems Analyst makes that vision real. Near term, that means learning all three workstreams, taking ownership of backlog hygiene in the combined Jira project, running refinement for at least one pod, and building day-to-day relationships with the engineers and leads on site. Over the following quarters, it means the refinement load on senior team members drops noticeably, cross-pod dependencies and open questions are surfaced early rather than discovered late, and stakeholders inside and outside the team know exactly who to go to for a fast, accurate answer.
Long-Term Outcomes
Over time, this role compounds value in three ways:
- Business impact: engineers spend more of their time building because work arrives clear, prioritized, and ready to pull.
- Quality of life: a predictable, well-organized delivery rhythm that reduces context-switching, siloed knowledge, and the need to hunt for answers.
- Strategic positioning: the Product Owner is freed to lead outward-facing discovery and organizational relationships with confidence that the team behind them is organized and on track.
Core Responsibilities Include:Backlog Management and Refinement- Manage and maintain the team backlog in Jira across all three pods, ensuring engineers have a clear, continuous pipeline of prioritized, well-defined work.
- Lead or support refinement for one or more workstreams, preparing items in advance, driving clarity on acceptance criteria and dependencies, and reducing the refinement load on senior team leaders.
- Translate priorities, needs, and decisions into actionable work items that engineers can pick up without additional interpretation.
- Keep the combined Jira project organized and current so the team always knows what is coming next.
Cross-Pod Systems Analysis- Work across the Platform, Quality Engineering, and Architecture pods, shifting context quickly and maintaining a working understanding of what each is building and why.
- Identify cross-pod dependencies, integration points, and risks early and bring them to the right people with clear context and impact.
- Maintain a high-level understanding of the technical work and route detailed questions to the appropriate engineer when you cannot answer them yourself.
- Recognize repeatable patterns in requests and workflows and surface them as opportunities for the team.
Relationship and Stakeholder Engagement- Be on site regularly with the client team, building close, day-to-day working relationships with the engineering leaders, product lead, and engineers across all three pods.
- Join stakeholder and pilot-team conversations as needed to gather context, clarify requirements, and help move decisions forward without waiting for a formal handoff.
- Serve as a reliable point of contact for the team: visible, responsive, and able to give an accurate answer or find the person who can.
- Represent Stable Kernel with professionalism and a proactive consultant mindset in every interaction.
Delivery Coordination and Decision Support- Support team-level decision-making by framing options, trade-offs, and implications clearly for the Product Owner and engineering leads.
- Track open questions, blockers, and follow-ups to closure so nothing stalls between conversations.
- Contribute to combined ceremonies and the team's delivery cadence as a participant and organizer, not as a full-time facilitator.
- Report status accurately and proactively, raising unforeseen complexity and risk before it affects delivery.
Our Ideal Candidate- 8 or more years in systems analysis, business analysis, backlog management, or delivery coordination within software engineering teams.
- Strong Jira skills and hands-on agile refinement experience: preparing items, driving clarity on scope and acceptance criteria, and keeping a backlog healthy across multiple workstreams.
- Demonstrated ability to work across several technical teams at once and shift context quickly while keeping a clear picture of what each is doing.
- Comfortable working directly with engineers and technical stakeholders; able to learn a new technical domain, ask effective questions, and follow a technical conversation well enough to capture decisions and route open questions.
- Technical fluency that lets you understand platform, quality, and architecture work at a working level. Engineer-level depth is not required, but genuine technical curiosity and credibility with engineering audiences are.
- Proactive consultant mindset: visible, responsive, organized, and able to build relationships and drive follow-through without extensive direction.
- Clear, audience-aware communication: able to summarize status, surface risk, and frame decisions at the right level for engineers, leads, and stakeholders.
- Local to Atlanta and genuinely excited, not merely willing, to be in person with the client team on a regular basis.
Nice to Haves:- Experience supporting platform engineering, quality engineering, architecture, or developer-tooling teams.
- Exposure to test infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, performance and load testing, or internal developer platforms.
- A degree, training, or certification in computer science or a related technical field.
- Consulting or client services background with trusted-advisor experience.
A Bit More Info:Minimum Base Compensation: $125,000
This is a full-time position.
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.
Our generous total compensation package includes:
- Company-subsidized health, vision, and dental plan premium options beginning on the first day of employment
- 401k with above-average company matching
- Fully paid Group Life, Short and Long Term Disability, and AD&D insurance
- Optional Flexible Spending Account, Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, and Health Savings Account participation
- Voluntary Life, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance
- EAP and Health Advocacy program available at no cost to employees and their dependents
- Paid time off and paid holidays
- Access to Perks at Work program featuring a variety of discounted products and services
*Note - We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered.
