Business Analyst (Data Analyst) - Enterprise Datalakes Implementation Project

Pennant Solutions Group is hiring a Contract Business Analyst / Data Analyst to help deliver an enterprise Data Lake implementation on Microsoft Azure in a hybrid role based in Richmond, VA. This initiative focuses on bridging business needs with cloud data engineering architecture, so you can influence how data is governed, validated, and ultimately used across the organization.

What you’ll do

• Lead discovery sessions, workshops, and structured interviews with cross-functional enterprise stakeholders to capture data demands, consumption patterns, and analytical needs.
• Translate high-level, ambiguous requirements into Agile-ready epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria for delivery teams building a modern data platform.
• Create end-to-end functional and business documentation, including FRDs, BRDs, and technical design specifications.
• Produce granular source-to-target mapping (STTM) matrices covering ingestion frequency, transformation rules, filtering criteria, and business logic.
• Run deep-dive data profiling across RDBMS, NoSQL, JSON/XML, and flat files to uncover anomalies, schema drift, nullability patterns, and cardinality issues.
• Write complex SQL queries, analytical functions, and stored procedures to validate historical trends and edge cases across multi-terabyte stores.
• Partner with Data Architects to support multidimensional schemas (Star, Snowflake) and logical/physical models for Azure Gold and Consumption layers.
• Define and document enterprise KPIs, metrics, and attributes to enable a consistent business semantic layer.
• Collaborate with Data Engineers working with Azure Data Factory (ADF), Azure Databricks, and Azure Synapse to ensure ingestion pipelines match documented business rules.
• Help define partitioning strategies, choose file formats such as Parquet and Delta Lake, and evaluate lifecycle policies to balance performance and cost.
• Support metadata management and data cataloging with Microsoft Purview, ensuring lineage remains continuously tracked.
• Design data quality metrics, rules, and thresholds, and coordinate automated profiling and exception handling processes.
• Support compliance with enterprise data privacy and access governance requirements including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and SOC2 during ingestion and curation.
• Author and execute validation scripts and acceptance test plans to reconcile source data with target lakehouse layers.
• Coordinate UAT with business users, manage defect logging and triage, and drive backlogs toward resolution.
• Develop training materials (data dictionaries, runbooks) and conduct knowledge-transfer sessions to accelerate adoption of new data assets.

Required qualifications

• 5 to 15 years of experience as a Business Analyst, Data Analyst, or Systems Analyst, including enterprise data warehousing and big data initiatives.
• Direct involvement in at least one full lifecycle Enterprise Data Lake / Lakehouse design, development, or migration.
• Expert-level SQL skills, including complex joins, window functions, recursive queries, and query optimization.
• Proven ability to produce exhaustive STTM documentation that captures transformations, joins, aggregate logic, and metadata.
• Strong knowledge of relational data modeling, Data Vault 2.0, Kimball dimensional modeling, and Bronze/Silver/Gold (medallion) architecture.
• Familiarity with Power BI (DAX, Power Query) for prototyping and validating pipelines visually.
• Experience delivering in Agile, Scrum, or SAFe environments using Jira, Azure DevOps, or Confluence.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Analytics, Data Management, or a related field.

Project scope and key objectives

• Migration of legacy operational databases, ERPs, CRM systems, and external feeds into a centralized Azure Data Lake architecture.
• Decommissioning of siloed legacy data marts while transitioning workloads to ADLS Gen2.
• Standardizing Bronze (Raw), Silver (Curated/Cleansed), and Gold (Business Aggregates) layers for BI and advanced analytics.
• Enforcing governance, lineage tracking, and data quality frameworks across transactional and analytical pipelines.
• Supporting self-service analytics models with optimized Azure Synapse and Power BI assets to help accelerate data democratization.

Helpful add-ons (preferred)

• Microsoft certifications: DP-900 and DP-203
• Microsoft certification: PL-300
• CBAP or PMI-PBA
• Scripting knowledge (Python, PySpark, or R) for exploration and validation
• Change management and data governance experience in regulated industries (Finance, Healthcare, Insurance, or Retail)

Why this initiative

This project is a critical strategic investment in modern data architecture. You’ll be positioned at the center of a high-visibility, mission-critical transformation where your work shapes how the enterprise governs, surfaces, and consumes analytical data for years. Pennant Solutions Group also provides a competitive rate structure, exposure to top-tier enterprise cloud architectures, and a collaborative team of experienced data practitioners.