Lifecycle Architect

Viasat, Inc. • Carlsbad, CA

8d

About The Position

The Lifecycle Architect is an individual contributor responsible for the end-to-end design, architecture, and continuous optimization of the employee lifecycle experience—spanning onboarding, transfers, promotions, and offboarding. Reporting directly to the Leader of Employee Lifecycle Enablement and Service Delivery, this role owns the experience layer: translating people strategy into process blueprints, enablement frameworks, and self-service solutions that employees and managers can genuinely use. Critically, the Lifecycle Architect does not work in isolation. A core part of this role is partnering tightly with other lifecycle design and enablement roles as well as Tier 1 (HR Shared Services) and Tier 2 (complex case management) service delivery teams to ensure that designed experiences hold up in practice—informing how agents are trained, how knowledge articles are written, and how escalation paths are structured so the intended experience is consistently delivered at every point of contact.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Organizational Design, Business Administration, or a related field.
• 4–7+ years of progressive experience in HR Operations, Process or Service Design, or HR Project Management, with direct experience designing employee-facing processes at scale.
• Demonstrated success designing and implementing global employee lifecycle programs with measurable improvements in experience quality or operational efficiency.
• Prior experience working alongside or within an HR Shared Services or case management function, with a clear understanding of how process design decisions affect Tier 1 and Tier 2 operations.
• Strong proficiency in process mapping, journey mapping, and service design tools (e.g., Miro, Lucidchart, Visio); comfortable producing both high-level experience maps and detailed SOP-level documentation.
• Working experience with modern HRIS platforms (e.g., Workday) and HR service delivery tools (e.g., ServiceNow HR Service Delivery).
• Practical experience applying Agile/Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks in non-technical or HR environments.
• Ability to produce clear, plain-language process documentation, knowledge articles, and training materials for both employee-facing and agent-facing audiences.
• Comfortable working with case management metrics, process performance data, and employee feedback to identify patterns and translate findings into actionable design improvements.

Nice To Haves

• Master's or MBA preferred.
• Familiarity with knowledge management platforms and AI chatbot tooling is a plus.
• Certification (CSM, PMI-ACP) preferred but not required.
• Systems Thinking: Sees how individual process decisions ripple across tiers, teams, and systems—and designs with those dependencies in mind.
• User-Centric Mindset: Deep empathy for the employee and manager experience; instinctively designs for real humans, not org charts or internal convenience.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Skilled at working across HR functions—service delivery, HRBPs, Total Rewards, HR Technology—and bringing diverse stakeholders into the design process without losing momentum.
• Structured Communication: Translates complex process logic into clear documentation, visual artifacts, and presentations for audiences ranging from frontline agents to senior HR leadership.
• Bias for Clarity: Naturally challenges ambiguous or overly complex legacy processes and proposes simpler, better alternatives backed by data and user insight.

Responsibilities

• Architect and own the end-to-end journey maps for all major lifecycle events (Onboarding, Transfers, Promotions, Leaves of Absence, and Offboarding), documenting process flows, decision logic, system touchpoints, and role ownership at every step.
• Design for the full-service tier model, ensuring each lifecycle event has a coherent Tier 0 self-service path, a clear Tier 1 assisted support motion, and a well-defined Tier 2 escalation route—so no employee or manager falls through the cracks.
• Translate business and compliance requirements into human-centered process designs that balance operational rigor with a seamless employee experience.
• Identify and eliminate friction, using service delivery data, employee feedback, and root-cause analysis to simplify legacy processes, remove redundant steps, and improve end-to-end cycle times.
• Lead the design and ongoing maintenance of Tier 0 self-service assets—knowledge base articles, guided workflows, AI chatbot conversation flows, and manager toolkits—ensuring content is accurate, up-to-date, and written in plain language.
• Apply UX and content design principles to build self-service experiences that genuinely deflect Tier 1 contacts, co-creating with employees and managers through user testing, empathy mapping, and iterative refinement.
• Partner with HR Technology to define UI/UX requirements for People systems (e.g., Workday, ServiceNow), ensuring system experiences reflect intended process designs.
• Define and track Tier 0 performance, including self-service deflection rates and knowledge article effectiveness, using insights to continuously prioritize and improve the enablement content library.
• Serve as the primary design partner to Tier 1 and Tier 2 service delivery teams, ensuring process designs are operationally viable and that agents have the training materials, SOPs, and knowledge resources needed to deliver the intended experience at every interaction.
• Develop and maintain agent-facing enablement assets: standard operating procedures (SOPs), process guides, decision trees, escalation matrices, and onboarding/training materials for all lifecycle events.
• Establish structured feedback loops with service delivery, using case volume data, agent insights, and escalation patterns to identify where experience designs are breaking down and feed those findings back into the design cycle.
• Participate in quality review cycles, auditing case handling against process design intent and flagging systemic gaps for redesign, content refresh, or agent enablement uplift.
• Build and maintain governance models defining ownership, change management protocols, and version control for all lifecycle process documentation and enablement assets.
• Ensure all process designs comply with global labor laws and data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), partnering with Legal and Total Rewards to embed compliance checkpoints directly into lifecycle workflows.
• Maintain data integrity standards across lifecycle transactions in HRIS platforms (e.g., Workday), defining field-level requirements, downstream dependencies, and audit controls.
• Own the measurement framework for lifecycle experience quality, defining KPIs including process cycle times, completion rates, Tier 0 deflection rates, and employee satisfaction at key lifecycle moments.
• Conduct regular root-cause analysis on process failures, low adoption areas, or elevated service volumes, producing data-backed design recommendations for the Leader and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Build and maintain dashboards and reporting that make lifecycle health visible to People leadership and demonstrate the ROI of design and enablement investments.
• Manage a prioritized backlog of lifecycle design improvements, applying Agile and Design Thinking methodologies to deliver incremental, user-validated changes at pace.
• Facilitate co-design sessions (journey mapping workshops, empathy mapping, prototype reviews) with employees, managers, and HR stakeholders to ensure solutions are grounded in real user needs rather than internal assumptions.
• Act as the internal subject matter expert on employee lifecycle process architecture, advising HRBPs, regional HR teams, and HR Technology on design decisions and their cross-functional implications.

Benefits

• range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position offered
• comprehensive benefit offerings that are focused on your holistic health and wellness

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level