Director, Lean Delivery Optimization

This Director role will focus on Lean Delivery Optimization and reports to the Head of Payments Technology Center of Excellence You will be responsible for leading initiatives that drive measurable business value, operational resilience, and organizational excellence. This role is critical to the Payments Technology Center of Excellence effort to support the entire technology leadership team to:

•    Modernize the environment
•    Scale the Operation to comfortably meet revenue growth
•    Collaborative innovation
•    Drive growth with a stable platform and efficient integration expansion 
•    Deliver against our product roadmap
•    Modernization of our payments platform 

The Director, Lean Delivery Optimization will be responsible for leading cross-functional initiatives that drive measurable business value, operational resilience, and organizational excellence. This position collaborates with the entire Center of Excellence to emphasize the integration of Lean/Agile practices, process improvement, and value stream mapping with key objectives that drive the integration of value stream mapping, PDLC/SDLC governance, and Most Important Things (MITs), Key Performance Indications (KPIs), and success measures into DevOps practices, governance, and continuous improvement.

Key areas of focus include:

• Align architectural decisions with product roadmaps, customer expectations, and long-term business goals.

• Use a customer-centric and Profit and Loss-driven approach to ensure architectural standards support innovation and cost-effectiveness.

• Define and monitor KPIs aligned with Lean, Agile, and continuous improvement principles to measure platform and team success.

• Foster a mindset of ownership, empowering teams to align operational decisions with organizational Profit and Loss (P&L) goals.

• Mitigate operational risk through robust governance frameworks and streamlined processes.

•  Encourage a culture of continuous improvement to ensure ongoing innovation and competitiveness.

• Act as a key driver of transformation, ensuring alignment between operational processes, technology, and strategic business outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Encourage teams to adopt a platform/product-owner mentality, making decisions as if they own the P&L.

• Initiate KPIs and success measures that reflect both product and platform performance.

• Develop and implement a comprehensive technology governance framework, including policies for security, compliance, QA, and IT risk management.

• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to ensure operational priorities are aligned with customer needs and technology strategy.

• Oversee special projects related to organizational and process improvements, including the evolution of the Agile lifecycle, career planning, and operational efficiency initiatives.

• Empower teams to think beyond processes and own their outcomes, driving decision-making that supports innovation, customer impact, and revenue growth.

• Monitor and manage KPIs to ensure those target measures can and will be met and continue to measure what’s most important for the organization success measures that reflect both product and platform performance.

• Foster a culture of ownership within and across teams, ensuring that process improvements are fit-for-purpose, sustainable, and align with the broader P&L organizational goals.

• Build organizational knowledge and collaboration around enterprise architecture principles, fostering shared accountability and continuous learning.

• Promote customer-centricity by tying operational goals to end-user satisfaction and business outcomes.

• Build a people-first culture that aligns with global CoE values, emphasizing career growth and motivation.

• Align PDLC/SDLC practices with business and operational goals.

• Identify people change management opportunities and facilitate engagement and learning sessions for adoption.

• Embed people change management into transformation initiatives.

• Drive architecture and process-oriented design to enhance scalability and efficiency.

• Develop talent pipelines to ensure a strong, high-performing workforce that supports global delivery goals.

• This is a people leader role

• Travel is required, based on programmatic priorities.

What You’ll Bring to Zelis

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Proven ability to align and inspire diverse teams, ensuring alignment with strategic organizational goals.

• End-to-End Process Understand