Senior Business Analyst in Croydon

Janes empowers military, government, and defence leaders to act with confidence in an increasingly complex world. Our trusted defence, security, and geopolitical information delivered through seamless digital platforms and system integrations turns overwhelming data into clear, actionable intelligence and insight. By filling critical information gaps, Janes helps customers analyse threats, accelerate decisions, and stay ahead of emerging challenges.

We are seeking a Senior Business Analyst to join our product development team and play a key role in shaping enterprise-level Unclassified (OSINT) data products. This role requires strong expertise in business and data analysis, stakeholder engagement, and Agile delivery, with the ability to bridge complex business needs with technical execution. You will be working as part of a multi-functional team based in Croydon reporting to Demand Management Director, shaping our demands and deliverables within our Single Intelligence Environment. You should be self-motivated, a natural problem solver, and used to operating at a high-performance level, acting as a main driver feeding the teams with quality specifications.

How you will contribute at Janes:

• Partner with colleagues in Product, RD&A and Development functions to capture and refine business and functional requirements.
• Deliver high-quality product specifications for data products, ensuring alignment with Janes and overall technology strategy.
• Perform in-depth analysis of Product requirements, data flows, and system integrations to inform product design.
• Break down epics, features, and user stories with clear acceptance criteria and definitions of “done.”
• Collaborate with product and technical stakeholders to inform the mapping of the requirements technical features and user stories with clear implementation agreement.
• Challenge and refine requirements to uncover real business problems and drive impactful solutions.
• Collaborate with QA to define test strategies and support test case development.
• Continuously review development progress, providing feedback to ensure product delivery meets specifications.
• Support backlog structuring, impact analysis, gap analysis, and data-driven decision making.
• Lead backlog refinement and participate in stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.

The ideal skills and experience for this role are:

• 8+ years of experience as a Business Analyst, ideally in data product environments.
• Strong experience in business and data analysis, stakeholder engagement, and Agile delivery.
• Deep understanding of enterprise web applications, APIs, and DevOps practices.
• Experience of working in data modelling with data architects and data quality analysis.
• Hands-on experience working with APIs, relational/Non-relational D/Bs using scripting languages and/or other tools to draw insights/analysis.
• Working knowledge of data platforms involving ETLs (e.g. medallion architecture).
• Working knowledge of AWS Cloud platforms and services.
• Passion for data and highly data literate.
• Excellent networking skills with a desire to work collaboratively to achieve goals; experience of working in multidisciplinary agile teams.
• Excellent negotiation skills with commitment and ability to bring together people and processes to drive forward improvements/changes.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate effectively and confidently with technical and non-technical colleagues across departments.

Some of the desirable skills for this role:

• Familiarity with OSINT workflows, data analysis, or intelligence platforms is highly desirable.
• Graph data modelling – understanding nodes, relationships, and properties.
• Understanding of semantic data / ontologies.

Benefits:

• 27 days of annual leave.
• Healthy half (0.5 day leave every 6 months for wellbeing).
• Leave - study/ volunteer/ reserve forces.
• Pension plan (6% employer contribution).
• Private medical insurance – BUPA.
• Maternity (100% of basic salary for the first 26 weeks followed by Statutory Maternity Pay).
• Paternity (100% of basic salary for 6 weeks).
• Life cover.
• Access to LinkedIn Learning.
• Access to an on-site gym.

Our Mission:

Creating trusted open-source intelligence has always been our focus. Janes foundational defence intelligence, across military capabilities and order of battle, equipment, events, and defence industry, is verified and validated using our human-centric tradecraft to deliver the highest levels of assurance.

While open-source data is readily available to analysts and decision makers, it can be unmanageable in structure and volume, is not assured, and can be manipulated either intentionally or unintentionally. Janes open-source intelligence is verified and validated through our Tradecraft processes within our Single Intelligence Environment (SIE). Janes uses a multi-faceted approach to open-source intelligence, developed over 120 years, with all sources assessed for bias/objectivity, reliability, and level of certainty.

We excel at capturing and making sense of open-source information to regularly reveal new and timely insights. We provide clients with a definitive source of the ‘what’, the context to understand the ‘why’ and, particularly within our dedicated forecasting products, a prediction of what will happen in the future. Our news provides both a factual journal of record and commentary in order to add the necessary context behind the facts.

Our goal is to ensure our journalism and analysis is better, sharper, more relevant, more comprehensive, and more useful than other open-source providers. We achieve this through employing more than 250 analysts supported by many hundreds more freelance experts to source and verify information. Our experts are supported by technologies such as natural language processing, web scraping and monitoring, data visualization, and other analytical tool sets. A key value we provide is topic selection: deciphering what is salient, standing up the facts, and setting events into context.

Technology at Janes:

To support our Tradecraft we need the best technology solutions and capabilities, particularly in an increasingly complex world with exponentially accelerating volume of relevant information accessible. To respond to this challenge Janes has invested heavily in Technology, both in terms of people and software development.

Our vision is to operate a modern, commercially focused in-house Technology Team that is core to business success through effective partnering with Sales, Product, Research and Data teams to produce best in class OSINT data and product platforms that enable the mission.

We achieve this through our collaborative, supportive team-oriented and delivery-focused culture, utilising agile methodologies. Our technology group is comprised of cross-functional multi-disciplinary teams located across Croydon and Manchester.

Given the complexity of our data and Tradecraft processes we use a broad range of specialist technologies and approaches including AI, ML, graph and document databases, search platforms, serverless technologies and event processing platforms, customer portals, visualisation platforms, Geospatial systems as well as general purpose AWS platform capabilities.

Our world suits those who enjoy working within an empowered, disciplined development environment delivering complex solutions that require genuine problem solving and innovation. We are rightly proud of our culture which is reflected by our very high staff retention rate, which in turn reflects our friendly culture, interesting work, and the importance of our mission.

Life at Janes:

We believe Janes is truly a great place to work. Our values and leadership code drive everything we do, and we understand that the right behaviours and culture will always result in the best outcomes for our customers, our colleagues, our shareholders, and our business. We provide a supportive, stretching, and dynamic environment with the ability for you to grow rapidly, both personally and professionally. Janes is an inclusive and equal opportunities employer and encourages applications regardless of age, race, disability, religion / belief, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy/maternity, or gender.

Although this role is advertised as full time, Janes believes that flexibility at work can provide many significant benefits both to our colleagues and the business. We already work in a hybrid style across all offices and regions and can support different ways of working and offer different flexible working arrangements. So, if you are interested and have any requirements or needs in the way you would like to work, please apply, and speak to us about this. We will always consider part-time or flexible applications.