Business/Data Analyst
Business Analyst with strong experience with business rules, data mining, data interpretation of patterns of behavior skills

Internationally recognized firm is looking for a seasoned Business Analyst with strong data analysis skills (data mining, data modeling, data feeds, data transformation, etc. The ideal Business Analyst will have outstanding communication skills - both oral and written and experience with stock market data

This is a contracting position located in Rockville, MD (20 minutes from Washington, DC)

The Business Analyst will be working on a Surveillance Application which is designed to provide secure, web-enabled access to market transactions and data used to conduct surveillance.

Business analyst will be developing and enhancing business and functional requirements that will detect different SEC rule patterns It will allow users to select various data and transactions from multiple sources (including trades, orders, and other types of industry data), apply custom search filter criteria and retrieve a merged, chronologically sorted report. This will allow analysts to detect illegal trading and other breaks with SEC regulations.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Working between business leads/application users and developers to implement the logic of the SEC rule patterns and create quality business requirements. BA will be developing requirements to enhance existing patterns and developing new requirements that will detect brand new rule patterns. Person must be flexible as to methodology approach - group is using a hybrid methodology (Agile, RUP, waterfall)

Duties include, but are not limited to:
* Performing all levels of data, business, and trend analysis, including understanding data mappings, data feeds, data models, and data transformation within a Business context.
* Working with a diverse group of users in a multi-office environment, elicit and author business requirements, functional specifications, and end user acceptance test plans
* Assist technology staff in understanding business processes, and the resulting requirements and functional specifications
* Document and prioritize business requests
* Provide functional expertise and interface to the business during user acceptance (UAT) testing phases
* Validate that UAT results conform to the business requirements
* Author product documentation
* Respond to general inquiries regarding issues, including performing Ad-Hoc analytical requests
* Deliver a high level of client service through responsiveness and accuracy
* Provide input to weekly and monthly status reports and issues/risks logs, and act as reviewer for any and all IT artifacts (including requirements traceability, test cases, and QA results)
* Leadership and project management skills
* Available on-site during regular business hours

Skills and Qualifications:
Hiring manager is looking for a self motivated, detailed oriented candidate with strong analytical aptitude, and the demonstrated ability to learn quickly and think clearly and adapt quickly. Ability to work in a dynamic datacentric environment.

The candidate must have:
* Bachelors degree (minimum)
* 8+ years experience in a Business or Systems Analyst role with outstanding interpersonal skills
* Detail oriented with strong analytical aptitude
* Ability to communicate effectively with peers as well as all levels of management
* Experience eliciting and authoring business requirements, functional specifications, and end user acceptance test plans
* Experience working with large scale database systems
* Experience working with SQL as you will need to be able to extract and manipulate large amounts of data.
* Background in application development is considered a big plus