Business Analyst Job Description
A complete business analyst job description template, the ATS keywords recruiters use, and an honest look at what the title means from one company to the next.
"Business Analyst" covers two genuinely different jobs that happen to share a title. At one company it means requirements-gathering: sitting with stakeholders, documenting current- and future-state processes, writing user stories, and translating what the business needs into what IT can build. At another company it means reporting and data work — writing SQL, building dashboards, answering "why did this number move" — close enough to a data analyst that the two postings could swap job titles and nobody downstream would notice. A posting that doesn't specify which one it means isn't being careless; the title genuinely absorbed both meanings over the last two decades and never fully separated them again.
The tool list is a better signal than the summary paragraph. Requirements-leaning postings lean on words like stakeholder interviews, process mapping, user stories, UAT (user acceptance testing) and BRD (business requirements document). Reporting-leaning postings lean on SQL, Excel and a named dashboarding tool, with "ad hoc analysis" doing a lot of the work in the description. Most real business analyst jobs blend both to some degree — the ratio is what varies, and it's worth reading past the job title to find it.
Company size shifts the ratio further. At a large company, business analyst often sits inside a formal PMO or IT department with a defined practice and its own methodology. At a smaller or mid-size company — like the one below — it's frequently a generalist role that does real requirements work and real reporting, because the company isn't large enough to split the two into separate positions.
Marrowfen · Atlanta, GA
Full-time · On-site
$72,000 – $97,000
About the role
Marrowfen is hiring a Business Analyst to sit between our operations teams and the systems and reporting that support them, based on-site at our Atlanta office. You'll gather and document requirements for process and system changes, and you'll also pull and analyze the data those changes are supposed to improve — this role covers both halves rather than specializing in one.
You'll work directly with operations, finance and IT stakeholders who don't always agree on priorities, and with a backlog that's never fully caught up. We're looking for someone who can run a requirements workshop in the morning and write a SQL query to validate its assumptions in the afternoon.
What you'll do
- Gather and document business requirements from operations, finance and IT stakeholders for new initiatives and system changes.
- Map current-state processes and design future-state workflows that remove manual, error-prone steps.
- Write clear user stories and acceptance criteria that a developer or vendor can build against without a follow-up meeting.
- Pull and analyze data using SQL and Excel to answer recurring operational questions and support monthly business reviews.
- Build and maintain reporting and dashboards that operations leadership uses to track performance against goals.
- Lead or support user acceptance testing (UAT) for system changes before they go live.
- Facilitate requirements and design workshops across departments that don't naturally agree on priorities.
What we're looking for
- 3+ years as a business analyst, business systems analyst, or in a role combining requirements work and data analysis.
- Comfortable writing SQL queries to pull and validate data independently, without waiting on another analyst.
- Experience documenting business requirements (BRDs, user stories, process maps) that stakeholders actually sign off on.
- Advanced Excel skills; experience with a BI tool such as Power BI or Tableau is a plus and increasingly expected.
- Strong facilitation skills — you can run a requirements workshop between two departments that disagree.
- Able to work on-site in Atlanta and coordinate in person across operations, finance and IT stakeholders.
Nice to have
- Experience with process-mapping notation (BPMN, swimlane diagrams) or a tool such as Visio or Lucidchart.
- Exposure to Agile ceremonies and writing stories directly into a backlog tool such as Jira.
- CBAP or CCBA certification, or working toward one.
- Prior experience in logistics, operations or supply chain specifically.
- Familiarity with ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite) from a requirements or reporting standpoint.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 4% company match, vested immediately.
- Twenty days of paid time off plus company holidays.
- Free on-site parking at our Atlanta office.
- Annual professional-development budget, usable toward a certification such as CBAP.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$72,000–$97,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (3)
Important (7)
Mentioned in passing (8)
Frequently asked questions
Is a business analyst a technical role or a business role?
Both, in proportions that vary by company — see above. Some business analyst roles are close to indistinguishable from a data or reporting analyst; others are almost entirely stakeholder interviews and documentation, with no querying involved at all. Read the requirements section, not the title, to know which one a given posting is.
Do I need to know SQL to be a business analyst?
Increasingly, but not universally. Reporting-leaning roles expect it; requirements-focused roles often don't ask for it at all. When a posting never mentions SQL, that's usually — not always — a signal the role leans toward process and requirements work instead of data work.
What's the difference between a business analyst and a business systems analyst?
In practice, not much. 'Systems' in the title usually signals more IT-facing work — translating requirements into system specs — while a plain business analyst may sit closer to process and reporting. Companies use the two titles inconsistently enough that the distinction isn't reliable from the title alone.
Is CBAP certification worth pursuing?
Mostly for analysts a few years in who want to formalize a BA-specific skill set, or who work somewhere with an established BA practice that recognizes it. It's rarely a hard requirement on an individual posting — more often a 'nice to have,' or a personal investment in credibility.
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