Senior Business Analyst

Curriculum Associates•Chicago, IL

6d•Onsite

About The Position

At Curriculum Associates, we believe in the potential of every child and are changing the face of education technology with award-winning learning programs like i-Ready that serve a third of the nation’s K–8 students. For more than 50 years, our commitment to making classrooms better places, serving educators, and supporting accessible learning experiences for all students has driven the continuous improvement of our innovative programs. Our team of more than 2,500 employees is composed of lifelong learners who stand behind this mission, working tirelessly to serve the educational community with world-class programs and support every day. Summary: Senior Business Analysts are trusted partners to the business functions they serve. Their credibility as advisors rests on expertise they actively build and apply: deep knowledge of CA’s organizational ecosystem, fluency in how peers and the broader industry tackle the same challenges, and command of the functional discipline itself -- the frameworks, standards, and emerging practices that define what good looks like. This combination is what allows them to bring recommendations grounded in both CA’s context and a wider reference point. Sr. BAs shape how problems are framed, not just how requirements are structured. They anticipate downstream impacts before anyone asks. They are present in the operating rhythm of the business, not just the project lifecycle. Senior BAs also invest in the broader BA team -- mentoring peers, raising the quality bar through their own work, and contributing to the standards and methods that define how the function operates.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in business analysis, Sales Operations, data analysis, or a related field.
5+ years of experience in cross-functional project leadership and communication.
3+ years of experience in requirement gathering and documenting user stories.
3+ years of Business Analyst or SME expertise in CRM and data platforms (Salesforce, Snowflake, etc.).
High proficiency in process mapping tools (Visio, Lucidchart, Miro) and a solid understanding of SDLC (Agile/Waterfall).

Nice To Haves

Business Analyst certifications such as CBAP, CCBA.
Salesforce or data tool certifications.
Experience in EdTech or Publishing.

Responsibilities

Serve as a trusted advisor to business within the assigned domain -- present and accessible in the business’s operating rhythm, not just project ceremonies.
Build and maintain relationships with senior stakeholders; understand their priorities, constraints, and context well enough to anticipate needs before they’re articulated.
Lead discovery for complex, multi-team initiatives; facilitate workshops and alignment sessions that produce decisions, not just documentation.
Drive cross-functional alignment across competing priorities; resolve independently where possible, and know when to bring in IT Business Partnering leadership or peer domain BAs to reach the right outcome.
Mentor peers on discovery, stakeholder engagement, and requirements quality; contribute patterns and examples to the broader BA practice.
Shape and reframe problem statements; challenge assumptions and identify root causes that stakeholders may not have fully surfaced.
Structure complex, ambiguous business needs into clear, actionable requirements for high-complexity solutions -- with minimal rework from QA or development.
Anticipate downstream technical and business impacts; surface risks before they become blockers.
Connect individual initiative requirements to broader domain and organizational priorities -- visible in every piece of work, not just strategic conversations.
Actively shape refinement and sprint planning across complex, multi-team initiatives.
Hold accountability for requirements quality across the full initiative; QA and UAT surface few surprises attributable to gaps.
Lead UAT coordination: own coverage, quality, and completeness across multiple teams and workstreams.
Drive post-deployment validation and change management; track adoption, surface issues before they compound, and stay present until solutions are working as intended.
Own the accuracy, currency, and depth of process maps and documentation across the entire assigned domain -- beyond individual project cycles.
Build and apply contextual experience within the assigned domain: understanding why current processes and rules exist, what’s been tried before and what happened, where the recurring pain points are, and how the domain has evolved.
Recognize patterns that come with domain experience -- downstream impacts that aren’t obvious without context, approaches that were tried and didn’t work, trends that signal where the domain is heading -- and use that recognition to sharpen requirements and surface risks early.
Own the domain-level knowledge base: business rules, process maps, and entity definitions structured for reuse by both human practitioners and AI tools.
Design multi-step AI-assisted workflows for domain-level tasks; define the sequencing, inputs, outputs, and validation checkpoints for each.
Set validation standards for the domain -- documented criteria for what ’good enough’ looks like for AI-assisted outputs on each class of task (stories, epics, test cases, etc.).
Build and maintain a domain-level agent-readiness map: which tasks are agent-assisted, which require human judgment, and why -- reviewed quarterly.
Conduct periodic agent accuracy reviews; diagnose systematic errors at the root cause -- missing context, rule gaps, prompt quality -- not just surface symptoms.
Proactively identify functional-level gaps and opportunities; bring recommendations with supporting rationale, not just observations.
Drive improvements to BA team standards, templates, and toolkits; identify gaps and propose enhancements to the practice.
Contribute to BA hiring, onboarding, and community of practice as an active participant and knowledge contributor.