Principal Business Systems Analyst

Empower is committed to transforming financial lives by providing a flexible work environment and celebrating internal mobility. The Principal Business Systems Analyst will lead efforts to improve business processes and systems, focusing on supporting an API and Streaming Platform team, while collaborating with stakeholders to gather requirements and document specifications.

Responsibilities:

• Lead cross-functional collaboration in an Agile environment to gather, document, and manage requirements for software development projects
• Assist the Product Owner in evaluating and triaging incoming work requests through Intake and Initiatives
• Partner with the Product Owner to refine and prioritize Epics and Features in Jira, supporting release planning activities such as ROM estimates and readiness
• Translate business and technical needs into Epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and supporting artifacts to ensure shared understanding across stakeholders and delivery teams
• Define and document REST API contracts, including payloads, headers, error models, and versioning considerations
• Define and maintain Kafka and event schema specifications, including field definitions, data types, required vs optional fields, mappings, and event semantics
• Ensure consistency between API payloads and streaming events, validating alignment with upstream sources and downstream consumer needs
• Define and document non-functional requirements such as performance, scalability, security, and observability
• Partner with Engineers and Quality Assurance to review requirements, validate functionality, and support delivery outcomes through development and sprint reviews
• Troubleshoot issues, conduct impact analysis, recommend solutions, and support business queries, particularly during major incidents
• Create, own, and continuously improve documentation (flow diagrams, workflows, specifications, manuals, and field-level documentation) in Confluence or a wiki, including onboarding paths and diagrams
• Coach and mentor other Analysts, lead the center of excellence (COE) for the Analyst community within the value stream, and contribute to future application roadmaps focused on scalability and resiliency

Requirements:

• 10+ years of relevant experience working with development and systems teams as a Lead Business Systems Analyst, including complex, high-impact work with broad independence and sound judgment
• Strong skills in requirements elicitation, documentation, and translating needs into clear deliverables for technical teams
• Strong experience as a Technical Business Analyst on a platform, integration, or data-centric team
• Solid understanding of REST APIs and JSON payloads, and data modeling concepts such as field mappings and source-to-target logic
• SQL and relational database fundamentals, and ability to analyze complex business processes and multi-platform systems, including databases
• Proven ability to translate technical and non-functional requirements into actionable engineering work
• Strong knowledge of Agile development and Scrum practices
• Hands-on experience with Jira and Confluence for managing Epics, stories, and documentation
• Clear stakeholder communication skills, including experience collaborating across geographies
• Strong attention to detail, especially around field-level data accuracy and contracts
• Strong documentation skills to produce workflows, specifications, reports, manuals, and other artifacts
• High proficiency with technology including SQL, Toad, MS Access, Excel, and/or SharePoint, and the ability to manage multiple workstreams and prioritize effectively
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Experience working with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (Kafka or similar)
• Familiarity with schema management (Avro, JSON Schema, OpenAPI/Swagger)
• Basic knowledge of AWS services (EKS, MSK/Kafka, Redshift, S3, API Gateway, etc.)
• Exposure to log and monitoring tools such as Splunk
• Prior production support and troubleshooting experience
• Experience as a QA or Developer
• Understanding of data visualization or analytics platforms (Tableau, QuickSight)
• Prior programming experience in any language