Associate Business Analyst

BayFirst National Bank is a full-service community bank dedicated to providing a wide range of high-quality banking services delivered in a personalized, friendly manner. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, we are a true community bank with the goal of becoming a one-stop shop and trusted financial resource for the communities that we serve.

Understanding that our employees are our most valuable resource, we are committed to providing career development opportunities, competitive compensation, and generous benefits to our entire workforce. As an organization, we encourage open communication in an environment of mutual respect, where hard work is rewarded, and a professional but informal atmosphere is valued within the workplace.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

The Associate Business Analyst supports the Data Team in delivering the bank's data, analytics, and process modernization agenda. This is an execution role; keeping initiatives moving on schedule, documenting and improving the processes that surround them, and building reports that translate to leadership whether the work is paying off. The position is designed for an early-career professional who is organized, genuinely curious about how a bank runs, and ready to grow into a broader career in financial services.

Working across Retail, Commercial Lending, Finance, and Risk, the Associate Business Analyst translates business questions into project plans, workflow changes, and actionable reports. Success looks like initiatives that land on time, manual steps that quietly disappear, and reports that people trust enough to run the business from. The role reports directly to the Chief Data Officer and offers close exposure to enterprise data strategy, governance, and emerging AI capabilities.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Report Development

• Gather reporting requirements from business partners and turn them into clear specifications covering metric definitions, source systems, filters, and refresh frequency.
• Build, test, and maintain dashboards and recurring reports that support relationship management, loan production, portfolio monitoring, deposit growth, and expense management.
• Write and tune SQL queries against the bank's core, loan origination, and data warehouse environments to assemble the underlying datasets.
• Reconcile report output to system of record and general ledger balances and investigate variances before a report is released.
• Retire and consolidate redundant reports so the reporting inventory stays small enough to trust and maintain.
• Support ad hoc analysis requests from Finance, Credit, Retail Banking, and the Executive Team, with a clear statement of what the data does and does not show.

Project Management

• Maintain project plans, timelines, task owners, and status for the data and analytics initiatives sponsored by the Chief Data Officer.
• Run the operating rhythm of those projects: schedule working sessions, publish agendas, capture decisions, and action items, and follow up until items close.
• Track risks, issues, and dependencies, and escalate the ones that will move a date or a budget before they do.
• Coordinate user acceptance testing, training materials, and go-live communications for new tools and data platforms.
• Prepare concise status summaries for business unit leadership and, when requested, for the Executive Team.

Process Improvement

• Document current-state workflows across lending, onboarding, deposit operations, finance, and risk, and map where handoffs, rework, and manual data entry are costing the bank time.
• Propose and help implement future-state processes, including automation and intelligent document handling where it is appropriate and controls allow.
• Build simple baseline measures for cycle time, error rates, and volume so the effect of a change can be proven rather than asserted.
• Partner with process owners and Risk to ensure changes stay inside the bank's control environment and are documented for audit and examiner review.
• Maintain a running backlog of improvement opportunities, ranked by effort and expected benefit, and refresh it as new ones surface.

Data Governance and Quality Support

• Help maintain the enterprise data dictionary and metric definitions so the same term means the same thing in every report.
• Perform routine data quality checks, log exceptions, and work with source system owners to correct them at the source rather than in the report.
• Support the preparation of regulatory and board reporting packages under the direction of the Chief Data Officer.
• Follow the bank's data privacy, access, and information security standards in every request handled, and flag anything that looks inconsistent with them.

Collaboration and Communication

• Serve as a dependable point of contact between the data function and its business partners, translating between what the business asks for and what the data can actually answer.
• Present findings and recommendations in plain language, with the assumptions and limitations stated up front.
• Maintain shared project and reporting documentation so knowledge does not live in one person's inbox.
• Perform other duties as assigned in support of the bank's data, analytics, and technology objectives.

Qualifications:

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Accounting, Economics, Information Systems, Data Analytics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• One to three years of experience in an analyst, project coordination, operations, or reporting role. Strong internships and rotational programs count.
• Advanced Excel skills, including pivot tables, lookups, and building a model someone else can follow.
• Working knowledge of SQL or demonstrated ability to become productive in it within the first 90 days.
• Evidence of managing multiple concurrent workstreams to a deadline with limited supervision.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including comfort presenting to managers and senior leaders.

Preferred

• Banking or financial services experience, particularly exposure to lending, deposit operations, finance, or risk.
• Hands-on use of a business intelligence platform such as Power BI or Tableau, including report publishing and refresh management.
• Exposure to a modern cloud data platform such as Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Awareness of banking regulatory expectations, including data privacy, records retention, and model documentation.
• Practical experience applying generative AI tools to analysis, documentation, or reporting work.

Key Skills and Attributes

• Eager to learn, receptive to coaching, and comfortable in a fast-paced regional bank environment.
• Organized and reliable, with an instinct for closing loops and a low tolerance for items that quietly stall.
• Naturally curious about how work actually gets done, and willing to sit with a process owner to find out.
• Careful with numbers, and equally careful about saying what a number does not prove.
• Comfortable moving between detailed data work and a conversation with a business leader in the same afternoon.
• Discreet with confidential customer and employee information.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.