Business Analyst

Senior Business Analyst — Data Products

Croydon or Manchester \| Hybrid (2 days in-office) \| £70,000–£88,000 \+ bonus

The opportunity

A well-established intelligence and data services organisation is looking for a Senior Business Analyst to join their product engineering function. This is not a business process role. You will be embedded in a scrum squad working on enterprise-grade data products — shaping requirements, solving complex data problems, and acting as the connective tissue between product, engineering, and data architecture teams.

The organisation operates at the forefront of open-source intelligence, delivering data products and services to some of the world's most significant institutions. Their tech stack is modern, their roadmap is ambitious, and the data problems they're solving are genuinely interesting.

What you'll be doing

You'll take vague, ambiguous product asks and turn them into clear, actionable specifications that engineering teams can build from. Day to day that means:

• Deep-diving into data flows, ETL pipelines, and system integrations to understand what's actually happening under the hood
• Writing user stories, epics, and acceptance criteria that are genuinely testable — not just well-formatted
• Collaborating closely with data architects, engineers, and product managers (your stakeholders are mostly technical, so you'll need to speak their language)
• Using SQL or scripting to interrogate data, validate assumptions, and surface insights that move the product forward
• Leading backlog refinement and contributing actively to sprint ceremonies
• Challenging requirements and digging for the real problem — not just transcribing what you've been told

What we're looking for

The non-negotiables:

• 8\+ years as a BA in data product environments — financial services, insurance, or similar data-heavy regulated sectors are particularly relevant
• Hands-on experience with ETL pipelines and data transformation (medallion architecture / bronze-silver-gold a strong differentiator)
• Comfortable working with APIs, relational and non-relational databases, and cloud data platforms (AWS)
• Genuinely data literate — able to query data yourself, not just describe requirements for others to query
• Strong analytical instincts — you solve problems, you don't just document them
• Excellent communicator who can switch between technical and non-technical registers depending on the room

Desirable:

• Familiarity with graph data modelling (nodes, relationships, properties)
• Experience with semantic data or ontologies
• Background in or curiosity about intelligence, defence, or national security domains

What's on offer

• £70,000–£88,000 base salary depending on experience
• Performance-related bonus (company and individual)
• 27 days annual leave plus an additional half-day every six months for wellbeing
• Hybrid working — 2 days per week in Croydon or Manchester, remainder from home
• A genuinely modern tech environment: cloud-native, AI/ML-enabled, fast-moving