Process Discovery & Workflow Design for Agentic Systems
The Role
We are looking for an Agentic Systems Analyst who can walk into a client environment, understand how work actually gets done, identify where the value is, and quantify it in a business case the engagement is held accountable to. You are the role that turns business processes into the structured workflow maps, ontologies, and ROI models that drive what gets built and how its impact is measured.
This is the modern evolution of the systems analyst, redesigned for agentic delivery. Documenting current-state processes is the starting point, not the deliverable. Your work is to map them in a way that surfaces autonomy boundaries, decision moments, exception patterns, and human-in-the-loop requirements, and to translate that into a defensible value hypothesis the client signs up to. The quality of your mapping determines whether the Assembly Line ships or has to be rebuilt. The quality of your business case determines whether the client renews and expands.
You operate inside the POD alongside the Engagement Lead, the Technical Architect, the Technical Program Manager, and the Forward Deployed Engineers. Your load is heaviest in the early phases of an engagement, where discovery work is dense, the ontology is being built from scratch, and the business case is being established. As an account matures and standard ontologies and reusable workflow templates absorb the routine mapping, your role becomes increasingly on-demand: you are called in when a genuinely new system, function, or workflow requires fresh analysis and a fresh business case. Making yourself progressively unnecessary in any given account is the signal that the Factory is absorbing the discovery work correctly.
Key Responsibilities:
Process Discovery & Mapping
- Run discovery sessions with client business and operations stakeholders to understand how work actually flows, including the workarounds, exceptions, and undocumented rules that govern day-to-day execution.
- Produce process maps that capture decision points, handoffs, system touchpoints, and the conditions under which each path is taken.
- Identify which steps in the workflow are candidates for agent execution, which require human judgment, and which sit at the boundary and need human-in-the-loop design.
- Surface exception patterns and edge cases early; these are where Assembly Lines fail in production if they are not designed for from day one.
- Distinguish stated process from actual process; the gap between the two is usually where the value sits.
Ontology & Workflow Design
- Design the domain ontology that the Assembly Line will operate on: entities, attributes, relationships, states, transitions, and the business rules that govern them.
- Translate process maps into structured workflow definitions the Forward Deployed Engineers can configure agents against.
- Define the autonomy boundaries: what the agent decides on its own, what it escalates, what it never touches.
- Define the success criteria and evaluation logic for each agent in the workflow: what good looks like, what failure looks like, and how the system should know the difference.
- Partner with the Technical Architect to ensure ontology and workflow design align with reusable patterns in the Factory; flag candidates for new reusable templates as you encounter them.
ROI & Business Case Development
- Own the value hypothesis for the engagement: what the agentic workflow is expected to deliver, in what timeframe, and how it will be measured.
- Establish the baseline before build begins: current-state cycle time, error rate, throughput, cost per transaction, FTE load, or whatever metric the value case rests on.
- Build the ROI model the client signs up to: hard savings, soft savings, capacity reclaimed, revenue uplift, risk reduction, quantified in the client's own financial language.
- Track benefit realization through deployment and adoption; surface gaps between projected and actual value early enough for the POD to course-correct.
Client Partnership & Stakeholder Management
- Build trust with business stakeholders quickly, including process owners, operations leads, and subject matter experts, and earn the candor required to surface real friction rather than sanitized current-state.
- Translate between business language and technical specification fluently, in both directions.
- Manage stakeholder expectations on what agentic systems can and cannot do, and where human oversight is required regardless of capability.
- Run validation sessions where business stakeholders review and sign off on workflow designs before build begins.
POD Integration & Handoff
- Hand off workflow designs to Forward Deployed Engineers in a form they can build against without reverse-engineering your intent: structured, complete, and unambiguous.
- Stay engaged through the build phase to answer questions, validate assumptions, and refine the design based on what surfaces during configuration.
- Partner with the Technical Program Manager to ensure discovery and design milestones are sequenced correctly with build milestones.
- Contribute to IP capture: ontology fragments, workflow templates, and discovery playbooks that can accelerate future engagements in the same domain.
What This Role Is Not
- Not a traditional business analyst whose output is requirements documentation. Your output is structured workflow design and a defensible business case that drive build and unlock expansion.
- Not a process consultant producing slideware. Your maps are operational specifications, and your ROI models are the commitment the engagement is held to.
- Not a Forward Deployed Engineer. You design the workflow and own the value case; the Forward Deployed Engineer configures and ships it.
- Not the architect. The Technical Architect owns reusable patterns and Factory IP; you own domain-specific workflow design and benefit quantification within an engagement.
Qualifications:
- Required
- 8+ years in business analysis, systems analysis, process design, value engineering, or solution consulting on technically complex projects.
- Demonstrated ability to build and defend ROI models and business cases that engagements are held accountable to, translating process improvement into quantified financial impact in the client's own language.
- Demonstrated ability to map complex business processes, including the implicit rules and exceptions that do not appear in documentation.
- Experience designing workflows or business logic that engineering teams build against; your output has driven real systems in production.
- Strong technical fluency. You do not need to write code, but you must understand how systems integrate, how data flows, and how AI/ML systems make decisions.
- Excellent written and visual communication. You can produce a process map, a workflow specification, an ROI model, and a stakeholder-ready validation deck with equal confidence.
- Direct client-facing experience with business and operations stakeholders at manager and director level, including financial decision-makers.
- Comfortable operating with ambiguity; capable of running structured discovery and quantifying value without requiring perfectly briefed inputs.
- Strongly Preferred
- Background in AI, data, or technology consulting; you understand the agentic context, not just the analysis mechanics.
- Experience designing for agentic AI systems, RAG architectures, or LLM-orchestrated workflows.
- Familiarity with ontology design, knowledge graphs, or domain modeling.
- Experience in a professional services firm, systems integrator, or technology consultancy.
- Experience in regulated industries: financial services, healthcare, or insurance.
- Familiarity with workflow modeling notations (BPMN, UML), process mining tools, or value engineering frameworks.
- Prior experience contributing to reusable ontology libraries, workflow templates, or accelerator assets.
- MBA, finance, or operations background that strengthens the business case work.
Core Competencies:
Business Case Construction
Process Decomposition
Ontology Design
Stakeholder Partnership
Value Quantification
Technical Fluency
Communication Clarity
Delivery Accountability