Senior Technical Business Analyst - Legacy Modernization

Job Description

Job Description

This position will be - 100% on-site.

The Senior Technical Business Analyst – Legacy Modernization will serve as the single point of convergence between a mission‑critical, decades‑old ACCIS legacy ecosystem and multiple concurrent modernization, compliance, and stabilization initiatives. This role requires deep historical knowledge of legacy client/server architectures, the ability to reverse‑engineer undocumented business logic, and the capacity to translate that logic into forward‑compatible, regulatorily compliant, web‑based solutions without service interruption.

The candidate must simultaneously function as a business analyst, systems analyst, functional architect, testing lead, and de‑facto institutional knowledge holder for subsidized childcare systems operating at municipal and state scale.

KEY DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Legacy System Decomposition and Reverse Engineering

• Conduct forensic-level analysis of the existing ACCIS legacy platform, including undocumented PowerBuilder code, embedded business rules, hard-coded eligibility thresholds, historical payment calculations, and exception handling logic accumulated over multiple decades.
• Reconstruct implicit system behavior by analyzing source code, database schemas, triggers, stored procedures, batch jobs, scheduler logic, and historical defect records.
• Produce exhaustive functional and technical documentation that captures both intended and emergent system behaviors, including edge cases that only manifest under rare policy, enrollment, or payment conditions.

Business Analysis with Concurrent Hands-On Development Responsibilities

• Serve simultaneously as Senior Business Analyst and hands-on technical contributor within the legacy and modernization environments.
• Independently create, modify, and debug SQL queries, and database objects as needed to confirm system behavior and support requirement validation.
• Participate directly in the troubleshooting of modernization components (e.g., .NET Core services, REST APIs, Angular components) to ensure exact functional parity with legacy logic.
• Translate business and regulatory requirements into both formal documentation and executable technical implementations.

Business and Technical Requirements Authoring

• Develop highly granular business, functional, non-functional, and technical requirements that preserve legacy parity while enabling incremental modernization.
• Translate complex regulatory language, policy manuals, and operational practices into system-enforceable rules.
• Author requirements that explicitly map legacy ACCIS logic to future-state architectures, including one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one functional transformations.
• Independently validate requirements against live production behavior to ensure no deviation from existing eligibility, enrollment, or payment outcomes.

Conflicting Compliance, Delivery, and Operational Mandates

• Simultaneously ensure strict regulatory compliance, audit readiness, and policy fidelity while meeting aggressive delivery timelines that may require expedited releases and limited regression windows.
• Balance competing directives to modernize functionality while maintaining absolute backward compatibility, even when such directives introduce technical or operational contradictions.
• Absorb and resolve conflicting guidance from policy authorities, auditors, business leadership, and technical teams without delaying delivery or increasing production risk.

Quality Assurance, UAT, and Production Safeguards

• Design and maintain exhaustive test scenarios, test cases, and acceptance criteria derived directly from legacy system behavior.
• Coordinate parallel QA and UAT efforts across legacy and modernized platforms, ensuring identical outputs under identical inputs.
• Personally validate high-risk scenarios involving financial disbursements, retroactive adjustments, recoupments, provider rate changes, and eligibility recalculations.
• Ensure zero disruption to childcare subsidy payments, eligibility determinations, and compliance reporting throughout all releases.

Reporting, Analysis, and Continuous Improvement

• Analyze system data and operational outputs to identify inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and technical debt embedded in the legacy environment.
• Develop management-level reports that clearly articulate risks, dependencies, and downstream impacts of system changes.
• Recommend modernization approaches that balance technical feasibility, regulatory risk, budgetary constraints, and operational readiness.

MANDATORY SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Legacy Technology Mastery

• Minimum of 6+ years of hands-on experience specifically with PowerBuilder (client/server, object-oriented, event-driven), including direct source code modification and debugging.
• Minimum of 6+ years of experience working with IBM Informix databases, including SQL optimization, schema analysis, stored procedures, triggers, and batch processing.
• Demonstrated experience interpreting legacy financial, eligibility, and payment logic embedded directly in application code rather than configuration.

Government Program Domain Expertise

• Minimum of 6+ years of specialized experience working with subsidized childcare systems or closely related public assistance programs at the municipal or state government level.
• Direct experience with eligibility determination, provider payments, enrollment management, audits, and regulatory compliance.

Modern Web and API Development

• Minimum of 5+ years of hands-on experience developing or modifying .NET Core services.
• Minimum of 5+ years of experience with REST API design, documentation, and testing.
• Minimum of 4+ years of experience with Angular and modern JavaScript frameworks.

Integration and Middleware Technologies

• Minimum of 4+ years of experience with IBM MQ and IBM Broker or equivalent enterprise messaging platforms.
• Demonstrated experience documenting and validating asynchronous, event-driven integrations.

Business Analysis Tools, DevOps, and Delivery

• Minimum of 6+ years of experience using JIRA and Azure DevOps for requirements management, defect tracking, and release coordination.
• Expert-level proficiency with Balsamiq, MS Visio, MS Excel, MS Word, and Adobe Pro.
• Hands-on experience with API testing tools such as Postman.

Full Lifecycle and Role Compression

• Minimum of 6+ years of experience simultaneously performing business analysis, technical analysis, development support, testing coordination, and stakeholder management within the same role.
• Proven ability to operate without clear role boundaries in high-risk, compliance-driven environments.

Data Modeling and Prototyping

• Minimum of 5+ years of experience designing data models, performing detailed data mapping from legacy systems, and creating functional and technical prototypes that accurately represent both current and future states.

PREFERRED (Highly Desired) QUALIFICATIONS

• Prior experience working on the ACCIS system or an equivalent legacy childcare subsidy platform.
• Demonstrated ability to operate with minimal documentation, limited SME availability, and incomplete historical records.
• Proven success in environments with zero tolerance for payment errors, regulatory violations, or production outages.

At Ariel Partners, we solve the most difficult problems that inhibit technology from enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our vision is to be recognized by our stakeholders as an elite provider of IT solutions, so when they have their biggest challenges we’re on their short list. We’re looking for team members who share our values of: Integrity to do the right thing even when it hurts;  Commitment to the long term success and happiness of our customers, our people, and our partners;  Courage to take on difficult challenges, accept new ideas, and accept incremental failure; and the constant pursuit of  Excellence .