About the Role:We are seeking a highly motivated AI & Business Operations Analyst to join our high-performing Process Improvement team within the Business Programs Department. Over the past 9 years, Upgrade has grown rapidly and launched several main products; this fast-paced team is actively tasked with transforming and optimizing those expanding business operations to drive efficiency across the company.
In this role, you will be fully empowered to define, execute, and manage transformed processes through multiple avenues, including AI tooling, Virtual Agents, automation, and strategic procedural adjustments. The ideal candidate is a proactive and intellectually curious professional who thrives in a dynamic environment, ready to collaborate with operations, product, and customer experience teams to translate operational friction into structured, scalable solutions.
This role is based in our Phoenix Office on a Hybrid basis 3 days per week.
What You'll do:- Identify root cause of issues, operational bottlenecks, and customer pain points through our platform's core services and contact center channels.
- Leverage AI prompt engineering and workflow automation to design, test, and execute virtual agent workflows and automated business processes.
- Gather anecdotal and quantitative data across Upgrade's proprietary back-end tools, contact center platforms, and third-party system integrations to drive cost-business analysis.
- Monitor key systems for Upgrade across operational areas including verifications, servicing, virtual agents, and customer support.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with operations, product, and customer experience teams to identify and triage issues across domains, translating operational friction into product scoping, user stories, and business requirements (BRDs) for process improvement
- Responsible for incident management and escalation of issues related to our internal platform and automated customer-facing systems.
- Communicate in person with customer-facing teams regarding improvement opportunities, AI/automation feedback loops, and incident response.
What We Look For:- 2-3 years of professional experience in business operations, data analytics, product operations, or a systems analyst role.
- Financial Services or Fintech background of at least 1 year working within financial services, lending, digital banking, or a similarly regulated fast-paced environment.
- Critical thinking skills to recommend original, AI-driven, and highly productive process optimization ideas.
- Practical understanding of AI technologies, prompt engineering, and LLM behavior in a customer service or virtual agent context.
- Possesses a strong internal drive for Process Improvement, leveraging a natural curiosity to instinctively spot friction points and transform complex workflows into smarter, more scalable processes.
- Strong understanding and applied use of SQL for deep-dive data analysis.
- Thorough understanding of Engineering Concepts to utilize in the design, deployment, and management of Virtual Agent workflows that impact customer-facing or account-facing business processes.
- Experience with Web Analytics or Conversation Analytics tools (e.g., Heap, Full Story, Adobe, Google Analytics, or contact center analytics platforms).
- Ability to synthesize complex operational data into actionable business cases and cost-benefit goals.
Nice to Have:- Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Finance, Management Information Systems (MIS), Economics, Data Analytics, or a related field.
- Experience working in a heavy contact center environment, customer support center, or similar high-volume domain.
- Experience mapping business processes and building automated workflows (RPA, iPaaS, or AI orchestration).
- Experience with third-party APIs, solutions integration, and AI middleware.
- Familiar with Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, OpsGenie).
What We Offer You: - Competitive salary and stock option plan
- 100% paid coverage of medical, dental and vision insurance
- Flexible PTO
- Opportunities for professional growth and development
- Paid parental leave
- Health & wellness initiatives
