Services Operations Architect

Speridian Technologies is recruiting for a Service Operations Architect for our State of California Client, the Department of Healthcare Services, Behavioral Health. This person will be part of a long-term, fully budgeted, state-of-the-art, extremely vast IT modernization project working with a variety of cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
This is a remote role, however, there will be meetings in the Sacramento area several times a year.  Candidates are expected to work business hours, Monday-Friday Pacific time zone.  All candidates must be based in and work from the US. 
Join DHCS’s Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation
Location: Remote/Hybrid
Department: Department of Healthcare Services (DHCS)
Commitment: Full-Time Consultant (W2 employee of Speridian or 1099/IC for Speridian) 
Why DHCS?
At DHCS we are leading a transformative journey in Behavioral Health, reshaping systems and services to ensure better outcomes for communities across California. Our Behavioral Health transformation initiative is more than a project—it’s a movement to make California a leader in accessible, high-quality health services. We’re setting the stage for a new era of government services built on agile methodologies, cutting-edge technology, continuous improvement, and a relentless commitment to serving the public good.
At DHCS, we’re looking for innovators who are passionate about purposeful work and excited by the opportunity to drive lasting change through innovative solutions.
Our Core Values (Achieve Together, Be Curious, Elevate Yourself, and Deliver Value)

• We achieve together by championing a team-oriented workplace built on mutual respect, collaboration, and open communication.  
• We encourage individuals and teams to constantly be curious and seek a deeper understanding and fresh ideas that drive innovation and meaningful change.
• We provide a supportive workplace where you can elevate yourself and achieve personal growth through continuous learning, focused effort, and perseverance.
• We deliver value as part of every action we take to serve California’s citizens

Job Description
California’s Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) is leading a once-in-a-generation overhaul of its behavioral health system through the Behavioral Health Transformation (BHT) initiative. We're building a modern, responsive, and sustainable system of care—and we need a Service Operations Architect to help make it real.
This is a high-impact, delivery-focused role for a mission-driven systems thinker who brings structure to complexity, works independently, and delivers with precision. You’ll play a key role in designing and operationalizing the end-to-end behavioral health service delivery system lifecycle—ensuring that the path from legislation, through policy development, and software implementation is coherent, collaborative, and grounded in real-world policy implementation needs. This role exists to align policy, product, program, and stakeholder teams that often leads to inefficiencies and administrative process delays.
You’ll translate bold ideas into day-to-day practice—turning transformation into sustained, operational reality. Your work will support hundreds of DHCS staff and external stakeholders in delivering better behavioral health outcomes for Californians. This is an opportunity to leave a legacy—by making complex systems usable, scalable, and resilient.
Success in this role goes beyond compensation, work-life balance, a traditional corporate career mindset, or the boundaries of a typical consulting role. We’ve found that intrinsic motivation—a genuine drive to grow, solve complex problems, and create lasting impact—is a defining trait of those who truly thrive here.
Who You Are
You’re a self-motivated strategic operator who:

• Thrives in mission-driven work and navigates complexity with clarity
• Brings executive presence, situational awareness, and an ability to lead through influence
• Has an uncompromising focus on execution and exceeding expectations
• Sees the full system—policy, process, people, and tools—and knows how to align them
• Doesn’t flinch at diving deep into complex policies, programs, and technical constraints
• Thinks in processes, workflows, journeys and systems—not isolated features or deliverables

What You’ll Own
You will be a key contributor on the Product Operations team, helping mature BHT’s Operational Management capability and designing administrative processes and systems that span across 8 core domains. Specifically, you will:

• Lead efforts to design, document, and improve end-to-end service workflows that connect legislation, policy, program operations, and IT systems to user experiences.
• Map service journeys and cross-functional workflows that reflect user needs and government constraints.
• Document and standardize emerging cross-functional workflows to support consistent, scalable, and sustainable implementation across DHCS.
• Facilitate shared understanding of workflows and services across policy, product, IT, and stakeholder engagement teams.
• Conduct process engineering, service blueprinting, journey mapping, in co-creation sessions with DHCS staff, counties, and providers.
• Support the development and continuous improvement of knowledge systems, administrative workflow tools, and a DHCS knowledge graph to reflect operational realities.

What You Bring
Core Capabilities

• Strong process design and service operations expertise in regulated or policy-driven environments, including experience in government or highly regulated private-sector industries (e.g., healthcare, insurance, finance, logistics).
• Deep experience designing and maintaining workflows that span multiple functions and domains
• Comfort operating at both strategic and tactical levels—driving delivery, not just planning it
• Strong facilitation skills across policy, program, technical, and stakeholder teams
• Systems-thinking mindset that identifies gaps, misalignments, and opportunities for greater cohesion
• Familiarity with service design methods (e.g., process engineering, blueprinting, journey mapping, systems mapping, etc.)

Preferred Experience

• 8+ years in service design, service operations, process architecture, or public-sector transformation
• Experience working with behavioral health, health and human services, or government policy implementation
• Background in service design, process improvement, or workflow architecture tools and practices