About Pluribus Digital:
Join us and do work that matters: use your skills to improve how your government serves the public! Pluribus Digital partners with our government customers to design, develop, and deliver useful and impactful digital products. We are a hands-on digital services consultancy – part technologists, part change agents, and all heart. We employ modern best practices in all that we do as we work to solve problems in public health, financial industry regulation, granting citizenship and asylum, and identity and access management.
Role Description
As a Business Analyst / Functional Tester, you will play a key role in supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Health Insurance Oversight System (HIOS), a mission-critical federal application supporting the regulation and oversight of the health insurance marketplace. This role focuses on Operations & Maintenance (O&M), production support, user support, and incremental enhancements across numerous business modules.
Working within an Agile delivery team, you will collaborate closely with CMS stakeholders, Product Owners, developers, testers, architects, and operations personnel to translate business needs into clear, actionable requirements and verify, through hands-on functional testing, that what the team delivers meets those requirements. You'll own the work from requirement to validated feature, writing user stories and acceptance criteria and then testing completed work before it reaches CMS stakeholders. You will also support incident analysis, defect resolution, enhancement requests, business process improvements, and documentation efforts that enable the continued success of the system.
What You Will Do
Requirements & Analysis
- Elicit, analyze, document, and validate business, functional, and non-functional requirements from CMS stakeholders and business users.
- Develop user stories, acceptance criteria, business process documentation, workflow diagrams, and functional specifications.
- Analyze enhancement requests, production issues, and operational processes to identify opportunities for improved efficiency and user experience.
- Ensure requirements are complete, traceable, testable, and aligned with CMS objectives and governance standards.
- Maintain requirements and supporting documentation throughout the Agile delivery lifecycle.
Manual & Functional Testing
- Write and maintain test scenarios, test cases, and test data that trace directly to user stories, acceptance criteria, and business rules.
- Test each story within the sprint and confirm it meets acceptance criteria before it is marked done.
- Log clear, reproducible defects with steps, expected vs. actual results, screenshots, and severity. Retest fixes and verify closure.
- Maintain a requirements traceability matrix and the test evidence that release and CMS governance reviews require.
- Do exploratory testing to find edge cases, usability problems, and gaps in requirements.
- Work with developers on defect triage and root cause, and with QA staff on test coverage and standards.
Operations & Production Support
- Support investigation and analysis of production issues, customer-reported defects, and operational questions.
- Collaborate with technical teams to reproduce issues, clarify expected system behavior, and document business impacts.
- Reproduce production issues in lower environments and confirm fixes before they are deployed.
- Assist with prioritization of defects and enhancement requests based on business value and operational needs.
- Participate in root cause analysis activities and recommend process or system improvements.
- Help maintain operational documentation, knowledge articles, and user-facing documentation as system functionality evolves.
Agile Delivery
- Facilitate Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
- Partner with Product Owners to refine and prioritize product backlogs.
- Ensure user stories contain sufficient business context and well-defined acceptance criteria.
- Prepare User Acceptance Testing (UAT) scripts, data, and environments. Guide CMS business users through UAT and track their findings to resolution.
Stakeholder & Customer Engagement
- Serve as a liaison between CMS business stakeholders and cross-functional technical teams.
- Facilitate requirements gathering sessions, workshops, and stakeholder meetings.
- Communicate business needs, priorities, risks, and project status effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Build collaborative relationships across multiple functional areas supporting the HIOS platform.
Documentation & Process Improvement
- Produce clear, concise documentation including business requirements, process flows, decision logs, release documentation, test plans and test results, and training materials.
- Assist with maintaining standard operating procedures and operational documentation.
- Recommend improvements to business processes, operational workflows, and support procedures based on data and stakeholder feedback.
Minimum Qualifications
- Ability to obtain and maintain a Moderate Risk Public Trust designation.
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent professional experience).
- 3–5 years of experience as a Business Analyst supporting enterprise software applications.
- 2+ years of hands-on manual or functional testing of web-based enterprise applications, including writing test cases and running regression tests.
- Experience eliciting, documenting, and managing functional and business requirements.
- Experience logging and managing defects through their full lifecycle in Jira, Azure DevOps, or a similar tool.
- Experience supporting Agile software delivery teams using Scrum or SAFe methodologies.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to think through edge cases, negative scenarios, and data variations.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate effectively across technical and business audiences.
- Experience using collaboration and requirements management tools such as Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting CMS, HHS, or other federal civilian agencies.
- Familiarity with the Health Insurance Oversight System (HIOS) or similar healthcare regulatory systems.
- Experience supporting Operations & Maintenance (O&M) contracts, production support, or enterprise application sustainment.
- Experience working with incident management, defect tracking, and change management processes.
- Understanding of SDLC best practices and federal IT governance.
- Experience supporting UAT and release validation activities.
- Experience with test management tools such as TestRail, Zephyr, or Xray.
- Awareness of Section 508 accessibility testing practices.
- Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP), PMI-PBA, or Agile Business Analyst certification.
What Success Looks Like
- Translate complex business needs into clear, actionable requirements.
- Stories you've tested reach UAT and production with few escaped defects.
- Defects you report are clear and reproducible, so developers can act on them without follow-up.
- Build trusted relationships with CMS stakeholders and technical teams.
- Help resolve production issues efficiently while minimizing business disruption.
- Improve operational processes through thoughtful analysis and documentation.
- Contribute to reliable delivery of enhancements that improve the HIOS user experience.
- Support continuous improvement while maintaining the stability, security, and compliance of a mission-critical federal system.
Compensation and benefits:
Pluribus Digital offers a competitive salary that is determined at the time of offer. Compensation will be based on experience and qualifications, with salary ranges aligned accordingly. If a candidate is a strong fit at a more junior or senior level to what is outlined here, we will assess them accordingly and apply the appropriate salary range during the hiring process. The range for this specific role is from $110,000 to $125,000 depending on experience. Salary is augmented with opportunity to earn annual bonus and medical/dental/vision benefits, PTO, company paid life insurance and a generous 401k match program. Details on benefits can be found here: https://pluribusdigital.com/content/join/benefits.
