What part will you play? If you’re looking for a place where you can make a meaningful difference, you’ve found it.

The work we do at Markel gives people the confidence to move forward and seize opportunities, and you’ll find your fit amongst our global community of optimists and problem-solvers. We’re always pushing each other to go further because we believe that when we realize our potential, we can help others reach theirs. Join us and play your part in something special! The Senior Director, Operations leads the design and execution of the operating model supporting the Wholesale & Specialty division business. This role is accountable for simplifying and automating the end-to-end submission, clearance, underwriting, and quoting experience so underwriters can focus their time on risk selection, pricing, coverage, broker relationships, and portfolio decisions.
Working across Underwriting, Operations, Data, and Technology, the Senior Director identifies what work must remain in underwriter hands and what should be eliminated, standardized, or automated. The role develops data-driven solutions, including data scraping and automated information capture, with the long-term objective of removing routine keyboard activity from the underwriting process while maintaining appropriate judgment, governance, and controls.

Key Responsibilities

·   Own and advance the operating strategy, translating business goals into scalable workflows, service standards, capabilities, and measurable outcomes.

·   Design a streamlined, low-touch operating model that enables rapid submission intake, clearance, risk preparation, quoting, and binding while preserving underwriting judgment where it matters most.

·   Partner with underwriting leaders to define the decisions, risk insights, and relationship activities that belong in underwriter hands, and remove administrative or repetitive work that does not require underwriting expertise.

·   Lead the redesign of underwriting workflows with the goal of eliminating routine keyboard activity through automated data collection, data scraping, prefill, validation, routing, and straight-through processing.

·   Sponsor and prioritize automated solutions that gather, normalize, and enrich data from available internal and external sources, reducing manual research and rekeying.

·   Build an operating roadmap that moves the business toward an increasingly hands-off underwriting experience while establishing clear exception paths for complex, incomplete, or higher-risk submissions.

·   Partner with Technology, Data, Product, and Underwriting to convert business requirements into reliable solutions and ensure capabilities are usable, scalable, supportable, and aligned with enterprise architecture.

·   Establish clear intake, prioritization, and governance processes for operational improvement opportunities, balancing speed, customer value, underwriting impact, risk, cost, and implementation capacity.

·   Drive continuous improvement in clearance and quote workflows.

·   Develop operating metrics and dashboards that measure clearance time, quote time, touch time, automation rates, exception rates, data quality, service levels, quote volume, adoption, and business value.

·   Use performance data and frontline feedback to identify bottlenecks, test improvements, and scale successful solutions across applicable products and teams.

·   Ensure automated processes include appropriate quality controls, auditability, data protection, regulatory compliance, and escalation procedures.

·   Lead change management and adoption efforts, including stakeholder engagement, process documentation, communications, training, implementation support, and reinforcement.

·   Partner with distribution and underwriting leaders to ensure faster operations translate into a differentiated broker and customer experience.

·   Develop business cases and investment recommendations for operations initiatives, including expected capacity, service, growth, expense, quality, and risk benefits.

·   Participate in strategic and operational governance forums and provide senior leaders with clear recommendations, performance updates, trade-offs, and decisions needed.

·   Build strong cross-functional relationships and align stakeholders around a shared future-state operating model and implementation roadmap.

·   Lead the recruitment, development, engagement, retention, and organization of managed staff in accordance with company policies and budgetary requirements.

Leadership and Business Impact

·   Creates clarity on the work that requires underwriting expertise and the work that should be automated or handled through operations.

·   Builds an operating environment in which underwriters spend more time making risk decisions and less time gathering, entering, and reconciling information.

·   Combines ambitious automation objectives with disciplined controls, transparent performance measurement, and thoughtful exception management.

·   Promotes a culture of experimentation, accountability, continuous improvement, and measurable business value.

Qualifications

·   Bachelor's degree in business, operations, insurance, technology, data, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

·   Significant progressive experience leading operations, underwriting operations, transformation, process improvement, or technology-enabled business change in a complex organization.

·   Demonstrated experience redesigning end-to-end workflows and implementing automation, data extraction, data scraping, workflow, or straight-through processing solutions.

·   Strong understanding of commercial insurance underwriting workflows, including submission intake, clearance, risk evaluation, quoting, binding, and broker service; Wholesale or lower middle market experience preferred.

·   Experience establishing operational measures and using data to improve cycle time, capacity, service, quality, and business outcomes.

·   Strong working knowledge of governance, controls, data quality, privacy, compliance, operational risk, and change management.

·   Experience building business cases, prioritizing initiatives, managing budgets or vendors, and communicating with senior executives.

Core Capabilities

·   Operating model design

·   Underwriting workflow transformation

·   Automation and straight-through processing

·   Data extraction and process intelligence

·   Operational performance management

·   Business and technology translation

·   Executive stakeholder influence

·   Change leadership and adoption

·   Risk, governance, and controls

·   People leadership and talent development

Success Profile

The successful candidate is a strategic operator who understands how to simplify complex underwriting workflows without diminishing underwriting judgment. This person can define the few activities that truly require underwriter expertise, mobilize cross-functional teams to automate the rest, and use measurable results to sustain change. They bring strong business judgment, curiosity, execution discipline, and a relentless focus on creating a faster, easier, and more differentiated lower middle market experience.

US Work Authorization

US Work Authorization required. Markel does not provide visa sponsorship for this position, now or in the future.

Pay information:

The salary range for this position is $148,900.00 - $310,100.00. The posted salary range reflects the lowest and highest base salary applicable to this role across our U.S. locations. Individual offers are determined based on geographic location, experience, qualifications, internal equity, and other job-related factors. As a result, the salary offered for a specific location will fall within a narrower range than the overall range displayed in this posting. This position may also be eligible to participate in the Company's annual incentive plan.