Senior Functional Designer

major insurance company in Belgium is seeking a hands-on functional analyst/designer within its Life Information Systems domain. The mission is part of the teams responsible for delivering and maintaining applications supporting life insurance activities, including subscription of new contracts, changes to existing contracts, overall contract portfolio management, tariffs, management acts, fund and reserve calculations, premiums, claims and settlements.

The back-end applications are developed in COBOL (Micro Focus) with SQL databases and require interaction with various technologies and teams for front-end, printing and communication components.

In this role, the consultant will receive high-level functional requirements, analyse them and design robust IT solutions. The scope may include user interface, business logic and database architecture. The consultant will follow up implementation, define a test approach, interact directly with the IS Project Manager to agree on scope and milestones, and report progress to stakeholders. The role also includes reviewing source code when needed, writing SQL queries on demand, and supporting platform stability by monitoring and responding to production incidents and coordinating remediation efforts.

Missions principales / Main responsibilities

• Analyse high-level functional requirements and translate them into structured IT solutions
• Design solutions covering user interface, business logic and database architecture
• Help translate functional design into well-tailored technical design
• Prepare functional integration test cases based on requirements
• Test the product before delivery to users
• Follow up implementation of designed solutions
• Coordinate technical designers and programmers during implementation of functionalities
• Work closely with business stakeholders to ensure the final solution fits their needs
• Interact with the IS Project Manager on scope and milestones
• Report progress to IS stakeholders
• Review COBOL source code when needed and write SQL queries on demand
• Analyse potential corrective actions to be taken
• Ensure the stability and operability of the application/sub-application
• Monitor and respond to production incidents and coordinate remediation efforts
• Actively support project leaders in project implementation

Profile recherché / Required profile

Education:
• Master or Engineer in IT or in a scientific domain with IT interest
• Bachelor accepted with a minimum of 5 years’ experience in technical analysis

Mandatory experience and knowledge:
• Proven experience in functional analysis
• Experience as lead functional analyst
• Experience in IT solution design on large-scale projects
• Experience in application development of administrative systems in an IT department
• Strong understanding of COBOL Micro Focus source code and SQL Server
• Ability to capture main topics in discussions with technical IT people
• Mastery of MS Office tools
• Experience in an insurance or banking environment
• User interface design and testing experience in an insurance IT environment
• Professional knowledge of Dutch

Soft skills:
• Pragmatic and solution oriented
• Methodical, analytical and proactive
• Quality oriented
• Good communication skills
• Quick learner
• Proactive and flexible
• Client oriented
• Able to deal with punctual stress situations
• Able to plan own work while respecting deadlines and budget

Preferred experience:
• Life insurance
• Contract management, claims and finance
• Web-based client/server systems with MF back-end (COBOL Micro Focus / SQL Server)
• Batch processing
• COBOL Micro Focus / SQL Server programming experience
• .NET
• Agile and Waterfall project methodology
• Architectural design
• Ability to interact with technical and non-technical members of the organization
• Creative and dynamic

Languages
• English: good level
• Dutch: good level
• French: good level