Domain SME-Senior Manager

About the Role

This is an opportunity to lead high-impact transformation across the US retirement industry, helping clients modernize plan administration, strengthen operational performance, and deliver better participant and sponsor experiences. You will combine deep retirement domain expertise with business transformation, technology, data, and responsible AI capabilities to shape practical solutions and guide complex programs from strategy through implementation. As a senior leader, you will also build trusted client relationships, develop high-performing teams, and contribute to the growth of EY’s retirement transformation practice.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide strategic leadership for complex retirement transformation engagements, setting delivery direction, governance priorities, and measurable business outcomes.
• Lead, coach, and develop multidisciplinary teams; manage capacity, performance, quality, and succession while fostering an inclusive and accountable culture.
• Build trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders, influence key decisions, manage escalations, and identify opportunities to expand client value.
• Shape and lead responsible AI-enabled transformation initiatives across retirement operations, from opportunity assessment and business case development through implementation and value realization.
• Identify and prioritize AI, generative AI, intelligent automation, and analytics use cases that improve participant experience, operational efficiency, quality, compliance, and decision-making.
• Hands-on experience with US retirement plan administration processes, such as eligibility, enrolment, payroll contribution processing, employer match, vesting, fund changes, and termination events.
• Manage end-to-end US 401(k) business processes across plan administration and servicing.
• Lead implementation and conversion projects for retirement plan onboarding and transition.
• Interpret plan provisions and translate them into business and system requirements.
• Oversee payroll contribution processing, remittance reconciliation, and funding issue resolution.
• Drive requirements gathering, process mapping, and solution design for retirement operations.
• Coordinate testing cycles including SIT, UAT, and post-deployment validation.
• Ensure compliance with ERISA, IRS, and retirement plan servicing requirements.
• Support client-facing delivery for plan sponsors, advisors, payroll providers, and trustees.
• Manage risks across data migration, communications, transaction accuracy, and timeliness.
• Review and validate participant communications, notices, statements, and confirmations.
• Partner with operations, technology, QA, and compliance teams for smooth delivery.
• Monitor implementation milestones, defects, dependencies, and governance actions.
• Improve operational efficiency through process redesign and control enhancement.
• Support issue resolution during cutover, stabilization, and BAU transition.
• Experience supporting or leading PMO functions for large-scale retirement transformation programs, including project planning, milestone tracking, risk management, and stakeholder reporting.
• Proven ability to coordinate across business, technology, and vendor teams, ensuring alignment with project timelines, scope, and quality standards in retirement platform implementations or upgrades.
• Responsible for decision-making, optimizing processes, resource management, and overseeing team management as needed for task execution.
• Accountable for allocating personnel, supervising team members, assigning tasks, ensuring that the team has the necessary tools and support to succeed in their roles and optimizing and evaluating their performance to meet organizational goals.

Skills and Attributes For Success

• Understanding of end-to-end US 401(k) recordkeeping operations, including onboarding, contributions, distributions, loans, hardship withdrawals, beneficiary processing, and compliance-related participant servicing.
• Experience in creating business process maps for future state architecture, creating WBS for overall conversion strategy, and requirement refinement processes in multi-vendor engagement.
• Requirements Gathering, Elicitation – writing BRDs, FSDs. Conducting JAD sessions and Workshops to capture requirements and working close with Product Owner.
• Work with the client to define the most optimal future state operational process and related product configuration.
• Define scope by providing innovative solutions and challenging all new client requirements and change requests but simultaneously ensuring that client gets the required business value.
• Elaborate and deliver clearly defined requirement documents with relevant dataflow and process flow diagrams.
• Work closely with product design development team to analyse and extract functional enhancements.
• Provide product consultancy and assist the client with acceptance criteria gathering and support throughout the project life cycle.

Technology Skills

• Working knowledge of AI and generative AI concepts, including large language models, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, AI agents, and intelligent automation.
• Ability to translate retirement business needs into AI solution requirements, including data readiness, model selection, workflow integration, human oversight, and measurable success criteria.
• Understanding of responsible AI, model risk, data privacy, security, explainability, bias controls, and governance requirements in regulated financial-services environments.
• Experience collaborating with data scientists, architects, engineers, risk, legal, and business teams to prototype, test, deploy, monitor, and scale AI-enabled solutions.
• Experienced in data migration projects, ensuring seamless transfer of data between systems while maintaining data integrity and security.
• Skilled in data analytics, utilizing various tools and techniques to extract insights and drive informed decision-making.
• Strong understanding of data governance principles and best practices, ensuring data quality and compliance.
• Collaborative team player, able to work closely with stakeholders and technical teams to define requirements and implement effective solutions.
• Industry certifications (ASPPA/LOMA/RPF) will be an added advantage.
• Experience on solutions such as ALIS, OMNI, Relius, NeoSpin, Vitech, TRAC is preferable.

What We Look For

• An experienced retirement transformation leader with strong knowledge of US defined contribution and 401(k) operations.
• A record of delivering complex business and technology programs.
• Ability to operate confidently in a client-facing environment.
• Structured problem-solving, commercial awareness, clear communication, and sound judgment.
• Ability to influence across business, operations, technology, risk, and vendor teams.
• A passion for developing people, improving delivery quality, and applying data, automation, and responsible AI to create measurable client value.