Lead Technical Business Analyst (Portals & CMS)

Note: Only on W2

Job Title: Principal / Lead Technical Business Analyst (Portals & CMS)

Position Type: Contract
Location: Maryland (MD) or Virginia (VA) — Commercial Sector
Experience Level: 12+ Years of professional IT experience

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly seasoned Lead Technical Business Analyst with a minimum of 12 years of commercial IT experience to drive the strategy, design, and execution of our enterprise-level public portals, corporate intranets, and digital experiences. This role sits entirely within our commercial business division. A major focus of this position will be leveraging Sanity CMS to architect modern, flexible content models and decoupled web frameworks. You will act as the key technical bridge between commercial product managers, UI/UX designers, enterprise architects, and engineering teams to transform creative digital concepts into scalable technical realities.

Key Responsibilities

• Commercial Product Translation: Elicit, analyze, and document complex functional and non-functional requirements, turning commercial product visions into clear technical specifications (API payloads, content schemas, system integration flows).
• Sanity CMS & Portal Strategy: Partner with architects to design headless content models, document structures, and schemas within Sanity. Define structured content workflows, localization rules, and custom studio configurations to optimize the editorial experience.
• Jira Structuring & Backlog Health: Design, organize, and maintain the Jira ecosystem structure (including Epics, Features, components, and custom fields). Establish standard practices for backlog hygiene, cross-team roadmap visualization, and technical dependency tracking.
• Technical Story Writing: Author highly detailed, technical user stories. Craft clear, testable Acceptance Criteria using behavioral frameworks (e.g., Given-When-Then / BDD syntax) that address edge cases, Sanity webhook setups, API payloads, validation rules, and error handling.
• Scrum Facilitation & Agile Delivery: Lead and facilitate core Agile ceremonies—including Daily Standups, Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, and Retrospectives—ensuring the engineering team maintains a steady velocity and roadblocks are proactively removed.
• Release Management Coordination: Partner with DevOps, Release Engineers, and Product Owners to plan, schedule, and track portal features through the delivery pipeline. Manage release notes, coordinate production deployments, and oversee post-launch verification for content and code updates.
• Integrations & Architecture Collaboration: Map complex backend integrations between the Sanity-powered front-end portal and commercial ecosystems (e.g., CRMs like Salesforce, ERPs, e-commerce gateways, and marketing automation tools).
• UAT & Validation: Define the commercial User Acceptance Testing (UAT) strategy, coordinate validation with business stakeholders, and ensure digital experiences meet strict performance, usability, and brand benchmarks.

Required Qualifications & Technical Skills

• Experience: 12+ years as a Technical Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, or Scrum Master/Product Owner in commercial, corporate, or enterprise-scale environments.
• Headless CMS Expertise: At least 3+ years of specific experience working with Sanity CMS (or closely related modern headless platforms like Contentful, Strapi, or Contentstack). Proven understanding of structured content, GROQ/GraphQL querying, and Sanity Studio configuration.
• Jira & Agile Expertise: Advanced proficiency in Jira administration and structuring (building filters, creating custom dashboards, configuring workflows, and utilizing Jira Advanced Roadmaps). Expert-level capability in breaking down monolith technical requirements into clean, manageable vertical user slices.
• Technical Skills: Strong understanding of modern web architectures, including Jamstack, serverless, cloud platforms (AWS), and modern front-end frameworks (e.g., Next.js, React). Proficient in web fundamentals: RESTful and GraphQL APIs, JSON, HTML/CSS, and identity solutions (OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML, SSO). Solid data literacy, including using SQL or modern graph query languages for data mapping and analysis.
• Soft Skills: Exceptional stakeholder communication skills with a proven track record of managing competing priorities among commercial business leaders, content editors, and engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• Professional Business Analysis certification (CBAP, PMI-PBA).
• Agile leadership certifications (CSM, CSPO, SAFe POPM, or PMI-ACP).
• Experience with commercial analytics and personalization tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Adobe Target, Optimizely).
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools (e.g., Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Actions) and automated content deployment pipelines.