Premier (Premier Marine/Premier Canada) is one of Canada’s largest Managing Underwriting Agencies. A leader in the Specialty Insurance industry, 100% Canadian owned. Our people are committed to performance, positive outcomes, and career development that lead to mutual success for our organization, our valued employees, our partners and clients.
Whether you’re starting your career or taking it to the next level, Premier offers a unique environment for you to grow & succeed. If you believe in a job well done, then consider the following:
Position: Guidewire Delivery Director
Location: Any Office Location (Vancouver, London, Toronto) – Hybrid
Reports to: AVP, Technology & Operations
Hours: Full-time
Role Overview
The Guidewire Delivery Director is a leadership role focused on a large breadth of responsibilities for the Premier Technology Team. You will be accountable for our Guidewire platforms, delivering new capabilities, improving the overall resiliency of the platform, and leading a technical team of business systems analysts, developers and QA analysts. You will bring strong technical, collaboration and leadership skills, along with a track record of success. Perhaps most importantly, you will be driven to get things done through inspiration and passion that will bring energy and fun to the workplace ensuring the safety, soundness, and smooth operations of the Guidewire suite of applications across the entire the organization and external broker/advisor network enabling our clients with best in class digital tools and capabilities.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Delivery
- Leading the solution development life cycle of a large application portfolio.
- Supporting the development of the Guidewire technology roadmap.
- Leading and delivering on the technology strategy and roadmap for Guidewire, assisting with the implementation of the technology organization, and developing a resourcing strategy for your team and executing on tactical deliverables.
- Leading the Solution & Design and Operations teams for the Guidewire suite of applications and act as an advocate for feature development for technology solutions.
- Delivering enhancements for digital customers that create a positive and secure experience, high performance all while ensuring solutions meet or exceed quality and service level agreements (SLA) expectations.
- Ensuring that development follows integration standards, and ensuring teams follow standardized processes, including Development Operations (DevOps) methodologies.
- Managing relationships with vendors, contract management and business partners, and overseeing financials and productivity to assess team performance.
Technology Currency
- Shared accountability with project and Guidewire teams to ensure technology currency of our applications and infrastructure.
- Accountable for assessing, planning, and executing regular application and system upgrades to ensure the safety and soundness of our platform.
Operational Resiliency
- Accountable for the resiliency and smooth operation of all in scope Guidewire applications.
- Accountable for the development, execution, and ongoing improvements to incident management, problem management processes and their integration with enterprise, business, and vendor support processes pertaining to Guidewire applications.
- Coordinates with Vendor Partners to ensure the operational readiness, including completeness and sufficient depth of all technology design and operational documentation.
- Regularly review the criticality of applications, actively maintain disaster recovery plans.
Site Reliability Engineering
- Accountable for envisioning, planning, implementing, and operating proactive monitoring tools and capabilities to enable early detection and early intervention of potential problems, and ensure overall resiliency of the platform.
- Accountable for designing, developing, and maintaining operational dashboards to identify operational gaps, trends, and to inform investment decisions.
Project Management
- Implement and integrate new tools (Systems, Networks, etc) into production environment which support our business partners
- Planning and delivering projects and enhancements in support of stated business objectives.
- Driving the adoption, utilization of best practices and optimization of processes, including Agile and Development Operations.
People Leadership
- Building a high-performance team and culture that is focused on customer success and cross-functional collaboration to enhance the digital application portfolio.
- Coaching and developing your team, recruiting and selecting talent, managing and rewarding performance, and fostering an agile culture to deliver on strategic objectives.
- Managing all external partners including but not limited to Guidewire.
Qualifications:
- Completion of university degree (Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology)
- ITIL, Guidewire Certifications
- Must have upon hire 10-12 years progressive experience in financial services and/or consulting
- Proven experience in managing vendors, large scale programs, Guidewire development and operations in complex shared services environment.
Functional Knowledge:
- You have at least 7 years of people leadership experience in Technology, including experience leading teams in technology or application development.
- Have a proven track record of successful project and program delivery and the ability to achieve high levels of employee engagement.
- You initiate new strategies to capitalize on opportunities and lead the implementation of organizational change.
- Strong analytical, planning, and organizational skills.
- You integrate complex information to identify solutions or solve problems using critical thinking and apply a strategic mindset to adjust business plans.
- You foster innovation and continuous improvement with a focus on client experience.
- You create a high-performance culture through alignment of your team’s work with organizational goals and successfully convey messages with a sense of positive advocacy.
- Expert knowledge operating and/or developing large complex and heterogeneous systems and applications.
- Working knowledge of Guidewire and Digital Technology an asset.
- Deep knowledge of change management, root cause analysis, problem-solving, technical project management, resolving production outages/impacts and implementing permanent resolutions for issues.
- Project delivery experiences an asset.
- Provides leadership for all applications across the holistic Guidewire suite of applications.
- Strong written and oral communication skills.
Business Expertise:
- Financial Services (Banking and/or Insurance) domain knowledge and experience
- External industry/product knowledge
- Insurance and/or MGA experience an asset, including an understanding of insurance products and claims processes
- Experience working with both in house teams and vendor experts.
Interpersonal Skills:
- Ability to effectively prioritize and balance between competing priorities.
- Communicates and collaborates closely with a wide group of key stakeholders, including but not limited to, business sponsors, business product owners, technology solution designers, tech leads, as well as vendor partners to identify and pursue opportunities to continuously improve the Guidewire suite of applications.
- Ability to follow impact and influence approaches to align peers and stakeholders to ensure completeness of our incident management, problem management, communication reporting capabilities.
- Proven ability to build and maintain trust with peers and stakeholders
Compensation:
Based on qualifications of applicant pay grade may vary from $160,000 – $175,000
Founded in 1989, Premier is head quartered in Vancouver, with 5 additional offices located across Canada - Toronto, London, Cambridge, Laval, and Calgary. With over 150 employees, Premier’s companies include Premier Canada Assurance, Premier Marine Insurance. Visit our website for more information on our company and our unique specialty insurance products. www.premiergroup.ca
When you join Premier, you join a growing organization that’s focused on providing first class innovative insurance solutions! We will collaborate with you to develop your skills and talents to their fullest potential, exposing you to a broad range of assignments and continuous learning opportunities in a dynamic fast paced environment.
We offer a comprehensive benefit plan, offering exceptional health, medical, dental, vision care and life insurance; etc.
