Requirements Center of Excellence Lead

JOB DESCRIPTION

Requirements Center of Excellence Lead (Hybrid - Columbia, SC)

We are seeking a seasoned Requirements Lead to establish a Requirements Center of Excellence (CoE) to drive the standardization, governance, and quality assurance of requirements across business and technology initiatives. The lead is not responsible for the line management of Business Analysts. Still, it acts as the central authority on how requirements are defined, documented, validated, and maintained across projects and programs. The Lead ensures consistent practices, enforces quality gates, and supports regulatory compliance, ultimately enabling the successful delivery of customer-focused and compliant banking solutions.

What you'll do

• Define and maintain bank-wide standards and frameworks for business and technical requirements.
• Develop templates , best practices, and guidance tailored to financial services regulations and risk management.
• Establish and manage quality gates for requirements, ensuring readiness for design, testing, and compliance review stages.
• Ensure requirements are structured to facilitate test case derivation, automated test coverage, and defect traceability.
• Ensure that requirements artifacts are structured to support internal audits and external examinations.
• Validate that all requirements are clear , testable, traceable, and aligned with regulatory and business objectives.
• Support teams in maintaining audit-ready documentation in line with internal policies and external regulatory expectations (e.g., FFIEC, Basel III).
• Partner with decentralized Business Analysts, Product Owners, Testing CoE, Risk, Legal, Compliance, PMO, and Technology teams to ensure proper application of standards.
• Establish feedback loops with Testing CoE to refine requirement standards based on defect trends and test execution outcomes.
• Ensure requirements processes, artifacts, and training enable business analysts to act as liaisons between business and technology stakeholders, translating strategic objectives into actionable, testable, and traceable requirements.
• Choose, administer, and optimize the use of requirements management tools (e.g., ReqSuite, Modern Requirements, Jama).
• Define workflows for requirement intake, review, version control, and change management.
• Provide visibility into the health, quality, and status of requirements across initiatives (e.g., % of requirements with defined acceptance criteria, % of test cases mapped to requirements).

What you'll need

ABOUT US

AgFirst Farm Credit Bank provides financing, as well as technology and other value-added services, to association partners so they can lend to rural residents and agricultural operations of all sizes. We take pride in investing in our employees, our partners and our community.

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