Senior Technical Business Analyst / Scrum Master - FDA Food Safety Data Exchange (FSDX 2.0)

Senior Technical Business Analyst / Scrum Master - FDA Food Safety Data Exchange (FSDX 2.0)

This role combines strong Business Analysis fundamentals with hands-on Scrum Master and Agile delivery leadership. The successful candidate will lead requirements discovery, analysis, decomposition, documentation, traceability, and validation while also enabling one or more Agile delivery teams to plan, execute, and continuously improve their work.

The Senior Technical Business Analyst / Scrum Master will work closely with FDA Product Owners, business stakeholders, architects, developers, testers, UX resources, state regulatory partners, and downstream system teams to translate complex business and technical needs into clear, actionable, testable requirements.

The role requires a strong understanding of business processes, requirements lifecycle management, Agile/Scrum practices, system integrations, data flows, and software delivery. The candidate must be able to facilitate productive conversations across business and technical teams, remove delivery obstacles, maintain backlog readiness, promote team accountability, and ensure that requirements remain traceable from business need through implementation and validation.

The position supports concurrent Development, Modernization, and Enhancement (DME) and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) workstreams in alignment with FDA's Enterprise Performance Life Cycle (EPLC) and Precise's Agile delivery methodology.

Candidates must be USC/GC/EAD with ability to obtain a public trust clearance and be local to the Washington, DC metropolitan area and available for occasional onsite meetings at FDA facilities in Rockville or Silver Spring, Maryland.

Key Responsibilities

Business Analysis and Requirements Management

• Lead requirements elicitation activities with business stakeholders, Product Owners, subject matter experts, technical teams, state partners, and interfacing system teams.
• Apply structured Business Analysis techniques including stakeholder interviews, facilitated workshops, process analysis, document analysis, observation, data analysis, prototyping, and requirements walkthroughs.
• Translate business objectives, stakeholder needs, operational challenges, and regulatory requirements into clearly defined business requirements, functional requirements, non-functional requirements, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, and business rules.
• Analyze and decompose complex business requirements into appropriately sized features and user stories that can be understood, estimated, implemented, and tested by Agile delivery teams.
• Ensure user stories meet established Definition of Ready (DoR) criteria before entering sprint planning.
• Develop clear, measurable, and testable acceptance criteria that establish a common understanding of expected system behavior.
• Identify assumptions, constraints, dependencies, gaps, ambiguities, and conflicting requirements and drive them to resolution.
• Conduct requirements validation sessions to confirm that documented requirements accurately reflect stakeholder intent and business need.
• Perform requirements impact analysis when business rules, interfaces, architecture, policy, or technical dependencies change.
• Maintain requirements throughout the full requirements lifecycle, including clarification, refinement, change control, validation, and retirement.
• Support scope management by distinguishing defects, enhancements, new requirements, configuration changes, and out-of-scope requests.

Business Process Analysis

• Analyze current-state business processes, workflows, roles, decision points, data exchanges, and pain points.
• Develop as-is and to-be process models, workflow diagrams, swimlane diagrams, use cases, context diagrams, and business process maps.
• Identify process gaps, redundancies, manual activities, bottlenecks, and opportunities for automation or process improvement.
• Facilitate future-state process design sessions with business and technical stakeholders.
• Document business rules, decision logic, exception paths, and workflow dependencies.
• Ensure proposed system functionality aligns with approved future-state business processes and operational needs.
• Maintain clear documentation of decisions, rationale, assumptions, unresolved questions, and process changes.

Data and Integration Analysis

• Analyze data requirements associated with system interfaces, APIs, data exchanges, and legacy system modernization.
• Develop and maintain data mappings, source-to-target mappings, interface requirements, field-level requirements, validation rules, and transformation logic.
• Work with architects and developers to define API and integration requirements, including request/response behavior, error handling, authentication requirements, and business validation rules.
• Support analysis of legacy system data and functionality to identify capabilities that must be retained, modified, consolidated, or retired.
• Assist with identification and resolution of data-quality, data-mapping, and interface issues.
• Participate in technical design discussions to ensure the proposed solution remains aligned with documented business requirements.

Requirements Traceability and Validation

• Develop and maintain a Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) linking business requirements, functional requirements, user stories, design components, test cases, defects, and acceptance results.
• Ensure requirements remain traceable throughout design, development, testing, deployment, and release acceptance.
• Collaborate with QA personnel to verify appropriate test coverage for documented requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Review test scenarios and test cases to confirm they sufficiently validate business requirements.
• Support requirements-based regression testing and impact analysis for system enhancements, defect corrections, and technology upgrades.
• Identify requirements that are not adequately covered by testing and drive resolution before release.
• Support stakeholder acceptance activities and confirm that delivered functionality satisfies approved requirements.

Product Backlog Management

• Partner closely with the Product Owner to maintain a healthy, prioritized, and implementation-ready product backlog.
• Facilitate backlog refinement sessions with Product Owners, developers, testers, architects, UX designers, and other team members.
• Ensure backlog items contain sufficient business context, requirements, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and supporting documentation.
• Decompose large features and epics into appropriately sized stories that can be completed within a sprint.
• Identify dependencies, prerequisites, technical enablers, and sequencing considerations during backlog refinement.
• Support Product Owners in prioritizing backlog items based on business value, risk, dependencies, regulatory needs, technical constraints, and release objectives.
• Maintain sufficient refined backlog to support upcoming sprint planning.
• Ensure changes to requirements are reflected consistently across JIRA, Confluence, RTMs, process models, and related documentation.
• Help prevent uncontrolled scope expansion by ensuring new requests are evaluated, documented, prioritized, and approved through the appropriate process.

Scrum Master and Agile Team Facilitation

• Serve as Scrum Master for one or more Agile delivery teams.
• Facilitate core Scrum ceremonies, including:
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Backlog Refinement
• Sprint Review / Demonstration
• Sprint Retrospective
• Facilitate additional team planning and coordination sessions as necessary to support delivery.
• Coach team members on Scrum principles, Agile practices, team accountability, transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
• Help the team maintain a sustainable delivery cadence and focus on meeting sprint goals.
• Promote effective use of the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.
• Help ensure sprint commitments are realistic based on team capacity, dependencies, planned leave, technical complexity, and historical performance.
• Protect the team from unnecessary interruptions and unplanned work while ensuring legitimate production and operational priorities are appropriately addressed.
• Encourage self-organization, ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the team.
• Facilitate productive communication between business and technical team members without becoming a substitute for direct team collaboration.

Impediment and Dependency Management

• Proactively identify, document, and track impediments affecting team delivery.
• Work with team members, technical leads, Product Owners, and program leadership to remove blockers.
• Escalate impediments that cannot be resolved within the team in a timely manner.
• Identify and track dependencies across teams, systems, interfaces, environments, stakeholders, and external organizations.
• Coordinate dependency discussions and ensure owners, required actions, and target dates are clearly documented.
• Monitor external dependencies that may affect sprint or release commitments.
• Facilitate resolution of competing priorities or unclear ownership that could affect delivery.

Sprint Planning and Execution

• Work with the Product Owner and delivery team to establish clear sprint goals.
• Facilitate capacity planning and help teams account for available resources, planned leave, operational support, and competing work.
• Monitor sprint progress and help identify emerging delivery risks early.
• Facilitate discussion when sprint commitments are at risk and help the team determine appropriate corrective action.
• Ensure incomplete work is properly evaluated, documented, and returned to the backlog when appropriate rather than automatically carried forward.
• Promote accurate and timely maintenance of JIRA stories, tasks, defects, estimates, statuses, and acceptance results.
• Lead effective retrospectives that result in specific, measurable improvement actions.
• Encourage experimentation and continuous improvement in team processes.

Release Planning and Delivery Support

• Support release planning by identifying feature sequencing, dependencies, testing needs, environment requirements, and implementation constraints.
• Assist program leadership in maintaining release roadmaps and delivery milestones.
• Maintain JIRA release plans, dashboards, and sprint/release reporting.
• Coordinate closely with QA, infrastructure, security, development, and business stakeholders to support integration testing, regression testing, UAT, and deployment readiness.
• Support release-readiness assessments and ensure outstanding requirements, defects, risks, dependencies, and acceptance activities are visible.
• Develop or support development of UAT scenarios based on approved requirements and business processes.
• Coordinate stakeholder participation in UAT and document acceptance results, issues, and required follow-up actions.
• Support post-deployment verification and lessons-learned activities.

Cross-Team and Stakeholder Coordination

• Facilitate discussions involving Product Owners, SMEs, architects, developers, QA resources, UX resources, infrastructure teams, security teams, state partners, and external contractors.
• Translate technical concepts into business-understandable terms and business needs into actionable technical requirements.
• Track open questions, decisions, dependencies, commitments, and follow-up actions across stakeholder groups.
• Proactively follow up on unresolved items and escalate risks to delivery timelines as appropriate.
• Coordinate requirements and implementation discussions involving interfacing or downstream systems.
• Ensure stakeholder decisions are documented and communicated to affected team members.

Risk, Issue, Change, and Decision Management

• Identify requirements, delivery, dependency, testing, and implementation risks early in the lifecycle.
• Maintain and support program and team-level risk, issue, dependency, assumption, and decision logs.
• Facilitate identification of mitigation strategies, owners, and target resolution dates.
• Document significant business and technical decisions, including rationale and impacts.
• Support change-control activities by documenting requested changes, analyzing impacts, and ensuring approved changes are incorporated into the appropriate backlog and requirements artifacts.
• Ensure changes affecting scope, schedule, requirements, interfaces, or business processes are communicated to affected stakeholders.

Reporting and Governance

• Maintain accurate program and delivery artifacts including:
• Requirements Traceability Matrix
• Product backlog
• Dependency log
• Decision log
• Action-item tracker
• Process documentation
• Release and sprint dashboards
• Provide accurate summaries of sprint progress, requirements readiness, delivery risks, dependencies, testing status, and upcoming milestones.
• Support FDA EPLC documentation and stage-gate activities as required.

Requirements

• 5+ years of Business Analyst, Technical Business Analyst, or equivalent experience supporting software development or modernization initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience owning the full requirements lifecycle, from elicitation and analysis through implementation, testing, acceptance, and traceability.
• Strong understanding of Business Analysis principles and techniques, including:
• Requirements elicitation
• Requirements decomposition
• Business process modeling
• Re