Lead Business Systems Analyst

Lead Business Systems Analyst

The Lead Business Systems Analyst serves as the strategic liaison between business leadership and the Technology department, converting high-level business asks into clear, actionable technology requirements that engineering teams can build and quality teams can validate.

The role operates as a strategic partner to senior business leadership, ensuring alignment of technology initiatives to business strategy, operational priorities, and enterprise outcomes. The role pairs deep business curiosity with structured analytical inquiry to uncover the true intent behind a request, shape it into a defensible solution approach, and shepherd it through delivery to a tested, adopted outcome.

The role owns alignment between business demand, enterprise technology direction, and portfolio prioritization, ensuring that technology investments maximize business value, manage risk, and scale across the organization.

This role is deployed on Goodwills highest-priority, most complex initiatives and operates with substantial independence. It carries hybrid accountability for business analysis, requirements authorship, project leadership, and quality assurance, while also influencing roadmap development, prioritization decisions, and enterprise capability planning.

In addition to delivery accountability, the role contributes to technology roadmaps, long-term solution direction, and strategic planning efforts across business and IT leadership. Typically works on projects and initiatives that span 12 months- 2 years.

Principal duties include:

• Business Partnership, Strategy & Demand Alignment
• Business Discovery & Analytical Inquiry
• Requirements Translation & Technical Specification
• Project Leadership & Delivery on Strategic Initiatives
• Quality Assurance & Solution Validation
• Research, Innovation & Continuous Improvement
• Enterprise Influence, Roadmapping & Continuous Improvement
• Other

Requirements include:

• Two years of college education or experience equivalency, and a minimum of 7 years progressive experience in business analysis, systems analysis, or a comparable business/technology translation role.
• Bachelors degree in Information Systems, Business Administration, Data/Analytics, or related field preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to elicit, document, and validate functional requirements, user stories, and data integration specifications that engineering teams can build directly from.
• Demonstrated experience partnering with senior business stakeholders to align technology initiatives with business strategy.
• Proven ability to influence prioritization, roadmap planning, and decision-making.
• Experience leading complex, cross-functional, enterprise initiatives.
• Strong understanding of enterprise technology environments, including architecture, data, and integration.
• Project management experience leading complex, cross-functional initiatives end-to-end (12-24 months in scope); PMP, CAPM, IIBA CBAP/CCBA, or equivalent certification preferred.
• Working knowledge of QA testing practices, test strategy, test case authorship, UAT coordination, and defect triage, with willingness to deepen this capability on the job, or equivalent exposure to UAT coordination.
• Strong analytical and inquiry skills with comfort exploring data, processes, and edge cases to validate problem definition before recommending a solution.
• Proven facilitation and executive communication skills; able to translate fluently between business and technical audiences.
• Familiarity with modern enterprise platforms typical of Goodwills portfolio (e.g., Microsoft 365, Dynamics, data warehouse/BI tooling, Copilot/AI-assisted workflows) preferred.

Core cultural competencies include:

• Customer Focus
• Values Differences
• Communicates Effectively
• Situational Adaptability
• Drives Results
• Ensures Accountability

Physical/Sensory Demands:

Remain stationary for extended periods of time, repetitive use of hands, vision required to develop, design and implementation.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.