Senior Business Analyst - Contract

About the Company:

Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

 We’re a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with multi-awards for our amazing culture. Plus we have an impressive 10+ year
trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our colleagues in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives.

About the Role:

As a Stable Kernel Senior Systems Analyst, you will join an existing team, including other Analysts, embedded within a major national QSR client's Core Loyalty program. This is not a traditional requirements-gathering role: you will own discovery for loyalty services, lead cross-functional coordination across vendor and engineering teams, manage a live production support channel, and shape how the loyalty platform evolves through re-architecture and new integrations. Your blend of technical knowledge, systems thinking, and communication skills allows you to partner with client product owners and tech leads to define the “why” and “how”
behind complex loyalty initiatives, from build through support. Demonstrated experience building or re-architecting a loyalty program is required for this role. Senior Systems Analysts report directly to the Lead Business Analyst.

You may be classified as individual contributors or as people managers with individual contributor responsibilities.

Core Responsibilities Include:

• Technical Impact:
  ○ 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).
• Business Alignment:
  ○ 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.
• Interacting with Others:
  ○ 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.
• Autonomy and Ambiguity:
  ○ 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.
• Problem-Solving:
  ○ 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.
• Leadership: