Business Architect

About Our Company

We’re a diversified financial services leader with more than $1.5 trillion in assets under management, administration and advisement as of year-end 2024. Our team of 22,000 people across 19 countries, serves more than 3.5 million individual, small business and institutional clients. We are a longstanding leader in financial planning and advice, a global asset manager and an insurer. Our unwavering focus on our clients and strong financial foundation connects each of our unique businesses – Ameriprise Financial, Columbia Threadneedle Investments and RiverSource Insurance and Annuities. Here, we foster meaningful careers, invest in the future, and make a difference for clients, institutions and communities around the world.

Job Description

Support the design of end-to-end business experiences that drive specific, measurable business outcomes. Maintain a keen understanding of business strategy and the technology solutions landscape to identify, evaluate, and recommend solutions that enable enterprise and domain objectives. Actively engage in key initiatives and projects to ensure that delivery and operations achieve agreed-upon business outcomes through effective business architecture, analysis, and partnership.

Key Responsibilities

• Apply business architecture practices, guiding principles, and standard deliverables to support strategy execution. Ensure alignment between business strategy, capabilities, processes, and enabling technologies. Identify, evaluate, and recommend solutions that enable business and enterprise goals. Assess innovative and emerging technologies to determine their potential to create competitive advantage, cost efficiencies, and/or revenue growth. Ensure business architecture outcomes align to and enable domain, enterprise, and operational objectives.

• Support projects in defining scope, objectives, and business requirements, including prioritization of trade-offs where required. Collaboratively elicit requirements using interviews, workshops, working sessions, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, workflow analysis, and current-state assessments. Analyze business needs across people, process, technology, and information dimensions. Document business needs, high-level requirements, and supporting artifacts, and validate that delivered solutions meet defined requirements.

• Analyze existing capabilities to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement across people, process, technology, and information. Develop current- and future-state views including capability maps, value streams, business process maps, journey maps, and experience maps. Partner with business owners and user experience teams to create and evolve journeys and processes that support domain strategies. Drive consistency, reuse, and optimization of processes and solutions across capabilities within a domain.

• Build and maintain strong working relationships with business, operations, and technology stakeholders. Demonstrate understanding of business architecture practices and deliverables while serving as a trusted partner on business architecture and solution design matters. Effectively influence project direction and decision-making at the core project team level. Translate complex business and solution concepts into clear, executive-ready narratives, visuals, and artifacts.

• Perform high-level solution and feasibility assessments, including dependencies, constraints, integration considerations, and delivery complexity. Evaluate solution options (e.g., build versus buy, enterprise platforms versus fit-for-purpose tools) using logical analysis, effort sizing, cost considerations, risk factors, and expected business value. Support the software development lifecycle by partnering with developers, testers, and other technology professionals to enable quality, effective solutions. Ensure appropriate documentation is maintained for project-driven changes to capabilities and processes.

• Identify and support opportunities for process improvement, optimization, and automation. Contribute to automation, analytics, and AI-enabled initiatives, including participation in proof-of-concept or proof-of-value efforts. Stay informed on advancements in automation, analytics, and emerging technologies relevant to business operations, and assess their applicability to business challenges.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Business, or related field; or equivalent work experience. 

• 5-7 years of relevant experience required.

• 2+ years relevant experience, including impact analysis, solution design, project delivery, business requirements, competitive and industry research, process documentation. 

• Experience supporting or leading business process improvement/optimization/re-engineering initiatives or projects.  

• Knowledge of basic architectural principles with an aptitude to learn methods and tools to solve for business challenges. 

• Effective written and verbal communication skills. 

• Ability to effectively communicate with peers. 

• Ability to be resourceful and have an aptitude to learn quickly. Knowledge of PowerPoint, Excel and Visio.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications: Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Certified Business Architect

• Strong visual modeling skills (e.g., capability mapping, value streams, process modeling, high-level solution diagrams).

• Expertise in Automation & Analytics, identifying and solving use cases for RPA tools like Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, PEGA, etc.

• Experience with OCR/ICR tools

• Experience in NLP, including Sentiment Analysis, and analytics using unstructured data and chatbots.

• Cross-functional Collaboration: Ability to work with large, cross-functional teams to align with strategic objectives.

Visa Sponsorship

Applicants must have a valid work authorization that does not now, or in the future, require visa sponsorship for employment in the United States (e.g., H-1B, F-1 CPT, F-1 OPT, TN).

In-Office Collaboration

We are a client-centric, relationship-based business. Working together, in-person, is foundational to how we achieve results. By fostering a culture of face-to-face collaboration, idea sharing, productivity and personal connection, we deliver for our stakeholders — clients, advisors, employees and shareholders. Our employees work in the office at least four (4) days per week, with flexibility to work from home one (1) day per week. Some roles may require additional in-office time or different in-office expectations, and specific requirements will be discussed during the hiring process.

Base Pay Salary

The estimated base salary for this role is $100,000 - $137,600 / year. We have a pay-for-performance compensation philosophy. Your initial total compensation may vary based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and geographical work location. In addition, most of our roles are eligible for variable pay in the form of bonus, commissions, and/or long-term incentives depending on the role. We also have a competitive and comprehensive benefits program that supports all aspects of your health and well-being, including but not limited to vacation time, sick time, 401(k), and health, dental and life insurances.Full timeExemptTechnologyRSA Annuities

Ameriprise Financial is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, military status, veteran status, genetic information, citizenship, disability status, marital status, family status or any other basis prohibited by law.

We are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for individuals with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, speak to your recruiter to discuss how we can support you.