Senior Business Analyst — CTRM Platform (Systems Design)

Who we need

We are looking for someone who has learned system design discipline in a big-tech engineering environment and structured problem-solving, stakeholder handling and delivery rigour in a consulting environment — and who has since applied both to physical commodity trading.

You will sit inside the technology delivery team. Your job is to convert how business actually works into the design artefacts a development team builds from: process models, decision rules, data models, event definitions, state machines, and acceptance criteria. You are the person who makes sure the system that gets built reflects the real mechanics of the commodity trade lifecycle.

What this role is not

This is not an economist or market analyst role. No market fundamentals, price forecasting, supply/demand balances or trading research.

This is not a strategy or corporate development role. No market entry assessments, business cases for investment, or operating model strategy decks.

This is not a pure project management or delivery coordination role, though you will own sequencing within your workstreams.

It is a hands-on systems design role, embedded in a business architecture team, producing artefacts that are consumed directly by product owners, architects and engineers.

What you will do

Design the business architecture of the platform

Model business processes across Trading, Finance, Logistics and Risk as structured, decomposable process definitions — not narrative descriptions

Define the business entity model and data dictionary: entities, attributes, relationships, identifiers, cardinality, lifecycle ownership

Specify state models for the core objects of the commodity trade lifecycle including valid transitions and the events that trigger them

Maintain a business rules catalogue — conditions, decision tables, tolerances, thresholds and their owners — separated cleanly from process flow

Turn design into buildable specification

Write functional specifications and acceptance criteria precise enough that an engineer can implement without reinterpreting the business intent

Translate operational workflows into system logic: validations, calculations, allocations, postings, and automated decisions

Specify integration contracts and data flows between the trading platform, finance systems and external services

Work with architects and engineers through build and test, validating that delivered behaviour matches the design

Own the decision record

Run design decisions to closure: frame the options, present the trade-offs and risks honestly, secure the decision, record it

Maintain a decision log and a register of open items, assumptions and change requests

Prioritise across releases, sequencing scope on business value and technical dependency

Work with stakeholders

Elicit requirements directly from business stakeholders— including reconciling what they say they do with industry best-practices

Present designs and recommendations to senior stakeholders, including trading and operations leadership

Design the change-management dimension into the solution itself: role definitions, controls, adoption safeguards, and migration away from spreadsheet-based practice

Applied AI

Design AI-enabled and automated steps inside commercial workflows — document extraction, validation, drafting, anomaly detection — with clear boundaries on where a human decision is mandatory

What we expect

Experience in a large technology organisation (product, platform or engineering environment) with exposure to formal system design practice

Experience in a top-tier management consultancy or equivalent professional services environment

Experience with physical commodity trading, energy markets or CTRM systems

Fluent in both English and Russian (mandatory)

Deep working knowledge of the physical deal lifecycle

Understanding of trade finance and accounting interfaces: prepayments, invoicing, accruals, letters of credit, treasury and statutory reporting boundaries

Understanding of oil logistics of commodity trading

Demonstrable ability to produce structured design artefacts — process models (BPMN or equivalent), entity-relationship and data models, state diagrams, decision tables, interface specifications

Comfort working directly in an engineering delivery cadence: backlog, refinement, acceptance, release

Precision with terminology and versioned documentation

Strong commercial and financial analysis capability applied to system design questions

Location: Dubai, alternatively remote with regular travel to Dubai to work alongside the client's trading and operations team.

Nice to have

Crude, refined products or LNG flows specifically

Risk management functions: exposure, credit limits, position management, VaR

Pricing and reference data: Platts, Argus, ICE, forward curves, netbacks

Event-driven or microservices architecture experience; familiarity with event sourcing

Experience with CTRM platforms as implementation lead, BA or power user

Hands-on use of LLMs and automation tooling in a commercial delivery context

Chartering or shipping S&P exposure

Why this role

Direct influence over the architecture and roadmap of a trading platform being built from the ground up

Work at the point where deep physical trading knowledge meets modern platform engineering

High ownership: you define the design, you defend it, you see it built