Lead Systems Analyst

Simon & Schuster was named to Forbes magazine list of America's Best Mid-Size Employers 2022. Simon & Schuster is a global leader in general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for readers of all ages, and in all printed, digital and audio formats. Its distinguished roster of authors includes many of the world's most popular and widely recognized writers, and winners of the most prestigious literary honors and awards. It is home to numerous well-known imprints and divisions such as Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Atria Books, Gallery Books, Pocket Books, Adams Media, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing and Simon & Schuster Audio and international companies in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom, and proudly brings the works of its authors to readers in more than 200 countries and territories. For more information visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.


Simon & Schuster is modernizing UOPS, the core order-processing platform that drives order management, fulfillment, partner integration, and financial transactions for the company. The multi-year program, approved by executive leadership in August 2026, replaces legacy COBOL batch processing with modern .NET and SQL solutions using an AI-assisted approach — and its success depends as much on business understanding as on engineering.
The Lead Systems Analyst is the bridge between business operations and the modernization engineering team. This is a senior, high-judgment role: the hardest part of modernizing a 40-year-old system is not writing new code — it is understanding what the legacy system actually does, confirming which behaviors still matter to the business, and proving that replacements behave correctly before they take over production. This role owns that judgment.
The Lead Systems Analyst works directly with business owners across order management, distribution, EDI, and finance operations to document required behavior, validate what is actually used, prioritize what gets modernized first, define acceptance criteria, and coordinate business sign-off for production cutovers.
Please note that this role can be in-person, hybrid or fully remote
Key Responsibilities

• Discovery and documentation — Work with business and technical teams to document required functionality, production usage, business rules, interfaces, reports, and dependencies for each modernization module, using AI-assisted analysis and documentation tooling to accelerate the work.
• Usage validation and retirement analysis — Determine which legacy programs, jobs, reports, and interfaces are still used and still needed; build the evidence case for retiring what is not; obtain business-owner approval for retirement decisions.
• Requirements translation — Convert business requirements and legacy behavior into clear, testable solution requirements that engineers can implement directly: data mappings, business-rule specifications, acceptance criteria, and edge-case definitions.
• Prioritization with the business — Run recurring priority reviews with business stakeholders; translate operational pain (failures, delays, manual workarounds) into modernization sequencing.
• Validation and cutover sign-off — Review reconciliation and parallel-run results (first-pass data comparison is performed by the QA / Test Automation Engineer) from the business perspective: confirm that differences are explained, that required business behavior is preserved, and that edge cases the business cares about are covered. Coordinate business user testing and provide the business sign-off that gates each production cutover.
• Stakeholder communication — Serve as the credible, consistent voice between the modernization team and the business users who depend on the system daily: what is changing, when, and why it is safe.
Required Qualifications
• 7+ years of business/systems analysis experience, including significant experience on large-scale order processing, fulfillment, or supply-chain systems.
• Experience with EDI, order processing, and shipment-confirmation processing for large-scale distribution or publishing operations — including order intake and acknowledgements, distribution/warehouse orchestration, and invoicing flows.
• Experience using AI tools for discovery and documentation — e.g., AI-assisted code or system analysis, requirements extraction, or documentation generation — and the judgment to validate AI output against real system behavior.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with both business users and engineers — comfortable eliciting requirements from operations staff in business language and defending those requirements in technical design discussions.
• Proven ability to translate business requirements into coding/solution requirements — data mappings, rule specifications, and acceptance criter