Our Firm

American Century Investments® is a leading global asset manager focused on delivering investment results and building long-term client relationships while supporting research that can improve human health and save lives. Founded in 1958, the firm’s 1,400 employees serve financial professionals, institutions, corporations, and individual investors, offering a wide range of investment strategies across a variety of investment disciplines.

We are committed to providing institutional-quality, actively managed solutions with a performance-centered mindset. Our expertise spans global growth equity, global value equity, disciplined equity, multi-asset strategies, global fixed income, alternatives, and ETFs.

Privately controlled and independent, we focus solely on investment management. This empowers us to align our decisions with client expectations and concentrate on their long-term money management needs.

Our culture of winning behaviors exemplifies our dedication to clients every single day. Delivering investment results enables us to distribute over 40% of our dividends—more than $1.8 billion — to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a 500-person, non-profit basic biomedical research organization with a controlling interest in American Century Investments. Our dividend payments provide ongoing financial support for the Institute’s work of uncovering the causes, treatments, and prevention of life-threatening diseases, like cancer.

For more information, please visit americancentury.com.

Role Overview

Business Product Owners within American Century play a key role in helping to drive forward the strategic objectives of our business. This role will collaborate with Investment Operations and IT leadership to understand the business's vision, help execute the program roadmap, prioritize work to meet the business's and its client's objectives, and support and supervise the delivery of prioritized work within the Middle Office.

Additionally, the role will define and prioritize the product backlog to streamline the execution of business priorities and be accountable for maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the components for which the team is responsible.

This hybrid position will be based out of our Kansas City, MO office.

Responsibilities

• Work with Investment Operations leaders and other client business leaders on the execution of near and long-term roadmaps and design for key capabilities within American Century related to Investment Operations.
• Cultivate expertise on the wants and priorities of the department and teams that make up Investment Operations.
• Work with Executive Sponsors and Capability Owners to define and have accountability to prioritize features and story backlogs that build out these capabilities, including requirements gathering, data ingestion and output design, internal and external data sources and integration points, tools, and technology enabling data science and business intelligence teams, implementation strategies and planning, own the delivery and execution of prioritized features and story backlogs.
• Maintain effective and groomed backlogs for global IT resources, with clearly defined acceptance criteria per story, so that the development team is aware of expectations, priorities, and the roadmap of the product backlog.
• Assist the team in story definition, estimation, dependency identification, and sequencing for PI Planning events.
• Validate user stories meet their pre-determined acceptance criteria and verify stories are testable and can be used to generate testing objectives.
• Project management support for select Investment Operations initiatives (approx. 10%-20% of the time).

Requirements

• Experience performing within an Agile environment in partnership with a forward-looking global IT organization in building technical capability roadmaps.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Ability to work on assignments independently, using a high level of judgment and initiative in resolving problems and developing recommendations.
• Intuitive interpersonal skills to effectively communicate and collaborate with multiple business partners.
• Proficient digital literacy including Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
• Highly developed curiosity and strong technology stack understanding with the ability to learn new systems in a fast-paced environment within the Investment Management industry.
• Exhibits the American Century Investments Winning Behaviors: Client Focused, Courageous and Accountable, Collaborative, Curious and Adaptable, Competitively Driven, Adheres to the highest ethical standards and business practices, and Supports a culture of compliance.

Preferred

• 3 years related experience as a product owner or project manager of initiatives related to the asset management industry (bonus if within Investment Operations).
• Experience with current technology including Tableau, VersionOne, and BPM tools.
• Familiarity with Investment Operations functions such as Investment Performance, Investment Reporting, Fund Accounting, Financial Reporting, Tax, and Middle Office.
• Knowledge of Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Tools, Python, Java, Java Script, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), low code app development, and cloud architecture.

Additional Requirements:

Employees are required to be in the office on a scheduled frequency. Adherence to this schedule is essential to fulfilling the expectations of the role.

American Century Investments is committed to complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act and all other applicable Equal Employment Opportunity laws and regulations. As such, American Century strives to provide a reasonable accommodation to any qualified individual under the ADA to perform essential job functions.

American Century Investments believes all individuals are entitled to equal employment opportunity and advancement opportunities without regard to race, religious creed, color, sex, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age for individuals forty years of age and older, military and veteran status, sexual orientation, and any other basis protected by applicable federal, state and local laws. ACI does not discriminate or adopt any policy that discriminates against an individual or any group of individuals on any of these bases.

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