Business Analyst
Senior Business Analyst — Data Products
Croydon or Manchester | Hybrid (2 days/week in office) | £70,000–£88,000 + bonus
─────────────────────────────────────────
Read this before you apply ─────────────────────────────────────────
This role is not for business process analysts. It is not for data analysts who want to move into BA work. It is not for ERP, CRM, or Salesforce specialists. And it is not for BAs whose core skill is translating user requests into process flows or Jira tickets.
If that's your background, this isn't the right move and the interview will make that clear quickly.
What we're looking for is a Business Analyst who has spent their career inside data product environments — where the product itself is data. Think financial services, fintech, insurance, or intelligence platforms. Environments where you've been hands-on with ETL pipelines, written requirements for data transformations, interrogated data directly using SQL or Python, and worked credibly with data architects and engineers as a technical peer — not as a go-between. If that sounds like your day job, read on. ─────────────────────────────────────────
The organisation
A well-established intelligence and data services company. They build data products for some of the world's most significant institutions — their customer base includes major government and security organisations. Their tech environment is modern: cloud-native on AWS, AI/ML-enabled, with a full data platform stack. They're growing quickly. Seventy percent of revenue comes from the data products division you'd be joining. The roadmap is a five-year build, and they need people who can help them move fast. They don't need someone to document what the product team tells them. They need someone who can interrogate a vague brief, go into the data, and come back with a spec that engineering can actually build from. ───────────────────────────────────────── What the work actually looks like
Day to day you'll be embedded in a scrum squad, working on enterprise data products. That means: You're given an ambiguous product ask. Your job is to turn it into something buildable — by asking the right questions, going into the data yourself, and working with data architects and engineers to understand what's actually possible. You're specifying requirements for ETL pipelines and data transformations — not just writing user stories, but understanding how data moves between layers (bronze → silver → gold), where quality breaks down, and what the fix looks like in a spec. You're working with APIs. You can read API documentation, write requirements that a developer could build to, and spot when a proposed integration won't do what the product team thinks it will. You're writing SQL or using scripting tools to investigate data directly — not to hand off to a data engineer, but to form your own view on whether a requirement is achievable and where the gaps are. Your stakeholders are mostly technical. You switch between product language and engineering language depending on the room. You challenge data architects when their model doesn't serve the user need. You push back on engineers when a proposed shortcut will create problems downstream. You're not a scribe. You're a problem solver. ─────────────────────────────────────────
The non-negotiables
8+ years as a Business Analyst — in data product environments, not business process or ERP delivery Sector experience in financial services, fintech, insurance, or another data-heavy regulated industry Hands-on with ETL pipelines and data transformation — you should know what medallion architecture means and have worked in or around it Practical experience with APIs and relational/non-relational databases — able to read, write, and challenge API requirements Able to write SQL or use scripting tools to interrogate data yourself Working knowledge of AWS cloud data services Strong communicator who can hold their own in a room full of engineers ───────────────────────────────────────── Useful but not required
Graph data modelling (nodes, relationships, properties) Experience with semantic data or ontologies Familiarity with intelligence, defence, or national security data — this is a fascinating space to work in even if you haven't been in it before ─────────────────────────────────────────
The package
£70,000–£88,000 base salary (dependent on experience) Performance-related bonus — paid on company and individual performance, not guaranteed 27 days annual leave + an extra half-day every six months for wellbeing Hybrid — 2 days per week in Croydon or Manchester, the rest from home You need to be commutable to Croydon or Manchester for those two days