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 criteria precise enough for direct implementation and test automation.
• Strong analytical writing: able to produce documentation that becomes the authoritative record of system behavior.
• The judgment to distinguish a true business rule from a historical implementation accident.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publishing-industry experience.
• Experience on a legacy-modernization, system-replacement, or platform-migration program.
• Exposure to legacy or mainframe-style environments (e.g., COBOL-era batch systems) - enough familiarity to work effectively with legacy specialists when documenting system behavior. No programming or code-reading skills required.
• Familiarity with SQL - able to read queries and data-reconciliation reports and reason about data-level parity between systems.
• Familiarity with batch scheduling environments (AutoSys or similar) and overnight batch operations.
• Experience with warehouse management (WMS), 3PL, or drop-ship integration workflows.
• Experience coordinating user acceptance testing and production cutover approvals.

What Success Looks Like

• Engineers rarely need to re-research scope: discovery output is complete, accurate, and actionable.
• Replacements pass business validation on the first attempt; post-cutover defect rates stay low.
• Retirement decisions are evidence-backed and business-approved, measurably shrinking the legacy footprint.
• Business stakeholders report increased confidence in the modernization program.

Why This Role, Why Now

This is a rare opportunity to shape the modernization of a business-critical platform from the ground up: executive-sponsored, funded, and already delivering measurable production results. The Lead Systems Analyst joins as one of the first dedicated hires on the program and defines how business knowledge is captured and preserved for the next generation of the platform.