Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner

Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner (Hybrid BA → PM)
Location: Hybrid – Chicago, IL
Type: Contract / Contract-to-Hire

Role Summary
We are seeking a Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner who operates as a hybrid BA → PM and can immediately own requirements intake, prioritization, and backlog governance for an enterprise compliance management platform. This role requires a hands-on professional who serves as a gatekeeper for new requirements, actively challenges scope and timelines, and drives data-driven tradeoff decisions to protect delivery commitments.
The candidate will act as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and large, distributed engineering teams (primarily India-based), operating in an Agile environment with 50–60 developers across geographies.
Domain experience in biofuels, energy, or compliance is a plus but not required. Strong product/BA execution skills are mandatory.
Key Responsibilities
Own end-to-end requirements intake, analysis, and prioritization for enterprise platform features and enhancements.
Serve as gatekeeper for backlog, evaluating new requests against business value, delivery capacity, dependencies, and risk.
Actively push back on mid-stream scope changes and “urgent” requests using impact analysis and tradeoff discussions.
Translate business needs into epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Facilitate backlog refinement, sprint planning, and cross-team alignment in Agile / hybrid environments.
Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, QA, and Business stakeholders.