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RAND provides an exciting intellectual environment and opportunities for career growth. We hire highly qualified applicants and provide challenging assignments. Diversity is an essential operating principle at RAND. We look for unique backgrounds, original views and diversity in academic training, work experience and ideological outlook. We are committed to Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action.

RAND is currently recruiting for a talented Business Analyst (BA) / Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst to join our team and help define, test, launch, and manage quality digital products and systems. As a BA/QA analyst, you should be a strong problem solver who can identify and document the relevant details of system design, from requirements gathering to final product testing. This will require the ability to think critically and have a thorough understanding of the web application development process, including daily collaboration with front- and back-end developers and designers. You should be an advocate for user-centered solutions and expect to proactively lead BA/QA work throughout a project's lifecycle.

• The ideal candidate maintains a positive attitude and be a team player with a desire to impact change. The selected candidate should have strong analytical and technical skills along with demonstrated ability to not only get things done as an individual but to help lead projects in a customer-driven, fast-paced collaborative team environment.

Team Description

• The Information Systems (IS) Web Applications team helps raise RAND's profile by contributing to the awareness, understanding, and appreciation of RAND, its work, and its people through the development of technology and systems that support the publication of research and other important outreach. We are a small team supporting a large set of systems including numerous websites, contact management, email outreach, mobile applications, publishing systems, process management, and analytics, as well as our internal systems (CI/CD, build, monitoring, logging, etc.) that helps us keep everything running optimally.

BA Analyst Responsibilities Include

• Project management of team efforts. Help lead project and application planning activities including planning, scheduling, meetings, communications, and documentation.
• Work with key project stakeholders to analyze the feasibility of, and develop requirements for, new systems and enhancements to existing systems; ensure the system design fits the needs of the users.
• Identify business rules and opportunities for improving business processes.
• Management of SaaS systems including setup and configuration, reporting and troubleshooting.

QA Analyst Responsibilities Include

• Work closely with developers, project managers, and operations team members on testing and deployment activities.
• Create and execute test plans/cases based on evolving project requirements.
• Test web applications and off the shelf applications.
• Identify and document application issues.
• Lead UAT activities including writing User Acceptance Test (UAT) cases.
• Lead application deployment activities.

Qualifications

• Minimum 3 years of experience as a QA analyst, technical business analyst or technical project manager. Demonstrated project leadership experience.
• Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to work effectively with a wide variety of technical and non-technical stakeholders. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Strong analytical skills, troubleshooting skills and attention to detail - ability to quickly analyze problems, get things done, and “figure it out” with minimal requirements and guidance.
• Proven ability to lead project team activities in an Agile/Scrum/Lean team environment – familiar with best practices. Ability to adapt to changing business priorities.
• Experience in major areas of testing cycle – gathering, documenting, and analyzing requirements, providing estimates, creating test plans/cases, creating process diagrams, logging bugs, coordinating UAT, change management, deployment support. 2+ years of experience testing web-based and off the shelf software applications
• Proven ability to analyze, evaluate, and integrate business processes and procedures.
• Utilize time management skills and multi-tasking capabilities with ability to handle multiple and parallel projects.

Preferred

• Basic high-level knowledge of web design and familiarity with core technologies such as Web Analytics, Search Engines, Content Management Systems, HTML, JavaScript – ability to test major application tiers (user interface, middle tier, database, back-end / infrastructure components).
• Experience with a variety of testing and/or development tools such as Jira, Confluence Git, Selenium, etc.
• Administration of Jira, Workfront, Salesforce or similar SaaS products.
• Familiarity with Adobe products including Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop), AEM and Analytics.

Education

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited degree granting college/university.

Location

• This position will be based in one of the following RAND locations: Santa Monica CA, Washington DC (Arlington, VA) and Pittsburgh PA
• This position offers a flex work arrangement with a mix of time in the office and working from home.