Principal Business Systems Analyst

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

*** Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time, including CPT/OPT.***

Principal Business Systems Analyst will take a leadership role in evaluating business processes and systems to improve efficiency and effectiveness across the organization, with a focus on supporting an API and Streaming Platform team. This role partners with stakeholders and cross-functional teams to gather complex requirements, analyze data, and produce clear documentation and system specifications. You will help ensure accurate, consistent, and well-documented data contracts across REST APIs and streaming payloads, and you will drive alignment between business users, product, architecture, and engineering teams so solutions support organizational goals and product delivery.

• 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.

• 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…