Technical Business Analyst

Who we are

Optima Partners is an advanced data and business consultancy headquartered in Edinburgh, UK. We are a practitioner-led organisation that collaborates with top consumer brands to drive transformation and foster customer-centricity through our expertise in customer strategy, innovative design, and advanced data science and engineering.

We are proud to include leading UK and global brands among our current clients, including Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group, Bank of Ireland, Nationwide, Aviva, Biogen, Eon Next, OVO, Virgin Media O2, BT, HMD Global, Centrica and GSK.

The opportunity

We are looking for a Business Data Analyst to help clients turn complex business challenges into clear, actionable data requirements and measurable outcomes. This role combines strong business analysis capability with a practical understanding of data, reporting and analytics, helping stakeholders define problems, prioritise opportunities and shape data-driven solutions that deliver value. As part of Optima’s growing data and AI capability, you will work closely with colleagues across consulting, data science, data engineering, architecture and client engagement to understand business needs, define high-quality requirements and support the delivery of data products, insights and analytical solutions that are fit for purpose and adopted by users.

What you will be doing

- Lead and facilitate discovery activities to understand business problems, opportunities, objectives and desired outcomes before defining solution requirements.

- Elicit, analyse and validate business, data, reporting and analytics requirements using workshops, interviews, process analysis, document review and data analysis.

- Define business processes, business rules, KPI definitions, data requirements, user stories and acceptance criteria that enable successful delivery.

- Challenge assumptions and help stakeholders refine their thinking so that proposed solutions address the underlying business need.

- Work closely with Product Owners, Architects, Engineers, Analysts, QA and Delivery Managers throughout refinement, development, testing and implementation.

- Ensure requirements remain clear, complete, testable and traceable across the delivery lifecycle, supporting clarification and change control where required.

- Support prioritisation by identifying value, effort, risks, assumptions and dependencies, helping teams focus on the highest-impact outcomes first.

- Support business readiness, user acceptance testing, benefits tracking and solution adoption where appropriate.

- Build trusted relationships with business and technical stakeholders, acting as an effective bridge between client teams and delivery specialists.

- Contribute to continuous improvement by sharing knowledge, improving analysis approaches and helping strengthen delivery quality across the team.

The skills we would like you to bring

- Proven experience delivering business analysis on data, reporting, analytics or transformation initiatives.

- Strong analytical skills, with practical experience using SQL to support analysis, validation and insight generation.

- Good understanding of data management principles, including data quality, governance, data modelling, data architecture and analytics.

- Experience defining reporting, analytical and operational data requirements, including KPI definitions, business rules and acceptance criteria.

- Familiarity with software delivery approaches including Agile, Scrum and Waterfall, and experience working within multidisciplinary delivery teams.

- Experience producing high-quality business analysis artefacts such as business requirements documents, epics, user stories, process models and requirement traceability.

- Excellent communication, facilitation and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to build consensus and resolve ambiguity.

- Comfortable working across both business and technical teams, translating complex problems into clear, structured and actionable requirements.

- Exposure to Python, Databricks, cloud data platforms, financial services, insurance or regulated environments would be advantageous.

- Curious, pragmatic and collaborative, with a passion for using data to improve customer, colleague and business outcomes.

This is an exciting opportunity to work directly with clients, shaping high-quality data requirements and supporting the delivery of data products, reports and analytical solutions that help organisations make better decisions, improve performance and realise measurable value from their data.

What we offer

- Competitive base salary.

- Inclusion in our annual discretionary bonus plan with an on-target performance bonus of up to 15%.

- Up to 37 days holiday inclusive of personal and public allocations. Seven are fixed days for Christmas and New Year, and 30 are floating days taken at your discretion, subject to client scheduling and line manager approval.

- Private medical insurance, single cover.

- Group life and income protection insurance.

- Salary sacrifice pension scheme after three months’ employment.

- Access to over 1,000 perks and discounts via an employee discount portal.

- Dedicated development time plus tools and funding to support personal and professional development.