Yes, the Jackson manual parser design is quite different from other libraries. In particular, you will notice that JsonNode has most of the functions that you would typically associate with array nodes from other APIs. As such, you do not need to cast to an ArrayNode to use. Here's an example:

JSON:

{
    "objects" : ["One", "Two", "Three"]
}

Code:

final String json = "{\"objects\" : [\"One\", \"Two\", \"Three\"]}";

final JsonNode arrNode = new ObjectMapper().readTree(json).get("objects");
if (arrNode.isArray()) {
    for (final JsonNode objNode : arrNode) {
        System.out.println(objNode);
    }
}

Output:

"One"
"Two"
"Three"

Note the use of isArray to verify that the node is actually an array before iterating. The check is not necessary if you are absolutely confident in your data structure, but it's available should you need it (and this is no different from most other JSON libraries).

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
List<Employee> e = new ArrayList<Employee>();
ArrayNode array = mapper.valueToTree(e);
ObjectNode companyNode = mapper.valueToTree(company);
companyNode.putArray("Employee").addAll(array);
JsonNode result = mapper.createObjectNode().set("company", companyNode);

I'm not completely sure what are you intending and there is probably a more elegant solution to this (using POJOs rather than Collections and Jacksons JSON representation), but I guess this example will clear it out to you. But if you have some more complicated processing you might want to write custom (de)serializers or something like that. Written using Jackson 2.3.3

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
JsonNode parsedJson = mapper.readTree(json); //parse the String or do what you already are doing to deserialize the JSON
ArrayNode outerArray = mapper.createArrayNode(); //your outer array
ObjectNode outerObject = mapper.createObjectNode(); //the object with the "data" array
outerObject.putPOJO("data",parsedJson); 
outerArray.add(outerObject);
System.out.println(outerArray.toString()); //just to confirm everything is working

If you just want to create ArrayNode, ObjectMapper has method createArrayNode(), along with createObjectNode(). You can then add entries to it, as well as add node itself into other arrays, or as property in ObjectNode.

Actual construction of nodes by mapper is done using configurable JsonNodeFactory; default implementation of which simple constructs one of standard implementation types like ObjectNode and ArrayNode.