Senior Technical Business Systems Analyst - Retail Pricing Application

Join Canada's largest retailer, who is looking for a Senior Business Systems Analyst to support an exciting high-visibility application project involving a ML-based pricing and promotional tool. This is a Data Analyst role embedded in an ML product environment—focused on evaluating model performance, interpreting outputs, and helping teams understand whether the algorithm is delivering the right results.

Start Date: ASAP

Duration: Until December , possibility of extension to December

Location: 3 days/week onsite in Brampton

The Business Systems Analyst (BSA) acts as a critical bridge between business needs, product direction, and technical delivery for the Promo Price Optimization platform. The BSA will partner closely with business users and stakeholders, the Software Pod Product Owner, Technical Lead, developers, QA, and Project Manager to discover, analyze, and translate complex business problems into clear, actionable requirements for delivery.

A key focus of the role will be Discovery. The BSA will help investigate new business needs, understand current-state workflows and system behaviour, identify impacted systems and data, surface dependencies and edge cases, and drive requirements toward sufficient clarity for technical design, estimation, and implementation.

Core Responsibilities & Experience

• Lead and support Discovery activities for new features, enhancements, integrations, and business problems, working directly with users, business stakeholders, Product, and Engineering to understand the problem before defining the solution.
• Analyze current-state business processes, user workflows, system behaviour, data flows, and integrations to identify gaps, constraints, dependencies, and opportunities for improvement.
• Translate business needs and Product Owner direction into clear functional and technical requirements, process flows, user stories, acceptance criteria, and supporting documentation.
• Partner closely with the Software Pod Product Owner to refine business requirements, clarify scope and expected outcomes, identify open decisions, and ensure requirements remain aligned with product priorities.
• Partner closely with the Technical Lead and development team to understand system impacts, clarify requirements, define API and data requirements where appropriate, identify technical dependencies, and resolve ambiguities before and during development.
• Create implementation-ready JIRA stories with sufficient business context, functional requirements, acceptance criteria, edge cases, dependencies, and technical context to support estimation, development, and QA.
• Facilitate requirement and solution discussions across business and technical stakeholders, documenting decisions, assumptions, open questions, and follow-up actions.
• Work with users and business stakeholders to validate proposed workflows and requirements, ensuring the team solves the underlying business problem rather than simply implementing the initial requested solution.
• Partner with QA and developers to define testable acceptance criteria and validate that delivered functionality meets the agreed business requirements and expected user workflow.
• Identify requirement gaps, conflicting stakeholder expectations, data quality concerns, operational impacts, and delivery risks early and escalate them to the appropriate Product, Technical, or Project leadership.

Technical Skills

• Requirements & JIRA Documentation: Strong proficiency with Jira and Confluence, including writing clear user stories, technical requirements, acceptance criteria, process documentation, and decision records.
• Data Analysis: Proficiency in SQL for investigating data, validating requirements, troubleshooting discrepancies, and understanding underlying data models. Python exposure is an asset but is not required.
• System & Data Analysis: Ability to understand and document system interactions, data flows, upstream/downstream dependencies, integration points, and current-state versus future-state behaviour.
• API & Integration Analysis: Experience working with RESTful APIs and API documentation such as Swagger/OpenAPI. Able to collaborate with developers to understand request/response structures, business rules, validation requirements, and integration dependencies.
• Process & Solution Modelling: Experience creating process flows, sequence/data-flow diagrams, system context diagrams, or similar artifacts to communicate complex workflows clearly.
• Agile Delivery: Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum practices and how a BSA supports discovery, backlog refinement, sprint execution, testing, and iterative delivery.

Professional Skills

• Discovery & Curiosity: Strong ability to investigate ambiguous problems, ask effective questions, challenge assumptions, and distinguish the underlying business need from a proposed solution.
• Analytical Communication: Ability to translate complex business rules and workflows for technical audiences and communicate technical constraints, tradeoffs, and system behaviour clearly to business users and stakeholders.
• Structured Thinking: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to deconstruct complex workflows and systems into clear requirements, decisions, dependencies, and manageable units of work.
• Facilitation & Stakeholder Management: Comfortable leading working sessions with users, subject-matter experts, Product Owners, Technical Leads, developers, QA, Project Managers, Program Managers, and other cross-functional stakeholders.
• Requirements Quality: Meticulous attention to detail with a focus on ensuring requirements are clear, testable, internally consistent, appropriately scoped, and supported by documented assumptions and business rules.
• Ownership & Follow-Through: Proactively drive open questions and requirements to resolution, track decisions and dependencies, and ensure the delivery team has the information required to move forward.
• User Orientation: Ability to understand how users perform their work end-to-end and evaluate requirements in the context of the broader workflow rather than treating individual requests in isolation.
• Collaboration: Build shared understanding across Product, Business, Engineering, QA, and Project teams while constructively challenging unclear requirements or proposed solutions when necessary.

Must Haves:

• Requires solid industry experience (e.g., 3–5+ years) as a Business Systems Analyst, Systems Analyst, Technical Analyst, or similar role, preferably supporting data-intensive, analytical, or enterprise software products within an Agile delivery environment.
• Strong critical thinking and problem solving skills, with an ability to break down complex problems and articulate to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Analytical and technical curiosity; ability to form hypotheses based on findings, and work through issues creatively and methodically
• Excellent communication skills; ability to adeptly and concisely articulate findings and reasoning to a team of developers and data scientists, as well as merchant end users
• Strong SQL skills (intermediate to advanced; able to quickly understand database structures)

Nice to Haves:

• Experience developing in Python (back end)
• Experience working on data products or analytics-driven applications; or exposure to data science environments
• Retail industry experience