Senior Business Analyst - Contract

Stable Kernel•Atlanta, GA

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Systems Analyst at Stable Kernel, you will be part of an existing team, including other Analysts, embedded within a major national QSR client's Core Loyalty program. This role goes beyond traditional requirements gathering. You will be responsible for discovery for loyalty services, leading cross-functional coordination between vendor and engineering teams, managing a live production support channel, and influencing the evolution of the loyalty platform through re-architecture and new integrations. Your expertise in technical knowledge, systems thinking, and communication will enable you to collaborate with client product owners and tech leads to define the 'why' and 'how' for complex loyalty initiatives, from development through support. Demonstrated experience in building or re-architecting a loyalty program is a mandatory requirement for this position. Senior Systems Analysts report directly to the Lead Business Analyst. Depending on the candidate, this role may be classified as an individual contributor or a people manager with individual contributor responsibilities.

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.
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).

Responsibilities

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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.