Sr Director Core Insurance Platform

Independence Pet Group•Chicago, IL

7d•Onsite

About The Position

Independence Pet Holdings (IPH) is a corporate holding company established in 2021, managing a diverse portfolio of pet health brands and services across North America. IPH aims to simplify the pet parenting journey and improve pet well-being through solutions like pet insurance. The Sr. Director of Core Insurance Platform is responsible for the enterprise ownership, strategic direction, and long-term evolution of the company’s core insurance platform. This role is crucial for enabling revenue growth, product expansion, and operational efficiency, ensuring the platform supports business growth, regulatory compliance, and sustainability. The Sr. Director will lead IT engineering, integrations, and platform operations for EIS (Enterprise Insurance Solutions), ensuring the platform is secure, scalable, high-performing, and aligned with enterprise architecture standards. A key aspect of this role is defining and driving a multi-year (3-5 year) platform strategy that aligns with business and technology objectives. The position requires close collaboration with Business Product Owners, Architecture, Digital Engineering, Data Platforms, Security, and Infrastructure teams to deliver reliable core-system capabilities.

Requirements

15+ years in IT delivery for insurance platforms (P&C preferred; Pet Insurance a plus).
5+ years in senior technology leadership roles with enterprise-scale accountability.
Hands-on leadership experience with EIS Insurance Suite (Policy, Billing, Claims).
Strong knowledge of core insurance system architecture.
Strong knowledge of integration patterns (REST, events, messaging).
Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure and platform services.
Proven experience managing system integrators and offshore delivery teams.
Excellent technical communication and stakeholder leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Pet Insurance experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

Own the enterprise technical strategy, implementation, operation, and lifecycle of the EIS platform, ensuring core insurance capabilities scale across brands and enable long-term business growth, product innovation, and improved operational efficiency (Policy Administration, Billing & Payments, Claims Management, Product and Rules Configuration).
Ensure platform availability, performance, resiliency, and security.
Act as the enterprise decision authority for core insurance platform architecture, configuration standards, and customization tradeoffs.
Own platform-level technical strategy and ensure alignment with enterprise architecture and business priorities.
Lead the technical application architecture and implementation patterns for EIS within a cloud-based, API-driven ecosystem.
Enforce configuration-first and upgrade-safe design principles.
Co-define and govern EIS’s role within IPH’s enterprise architecture, ensuring alignment with long-term business, data, and platform strategies.
Drive architectural decisions and tradeoffs balancing scalability, speed, cost, and regulatory risk.
Ensure EIS upgrades, patches, and migrations are executed safely and predictably.
Provide leadership oversight and technical direction for core-system delivery supporting new product launches, regulatory initiatives, and major platform enhancements.
Accountable for platform delivery outcomes including speed-to-market, release reliability, quality, regulatory readiness, and operational stability.
Establish and govern testing automation, performance testing, and UAT standards.
Ensure CI/CD pipelines and controlled deployment practices are implemented at scale for core systems.
Establish delivery governance and decision frameworks that ensure predictable outcomes across multiple teams and vendors.
Own technical integrations between EIS and other platforms (Web and mobile digital platforms, CRM platforms, Payments, Pricing/rating engines, Document generation, imaging, and data/analytics platforms).
Ensure integrations meet reliability, security, and observability standards.
Lead system integrators and contract delivery pods through clear technical direction, delivery governance, and performance accountability.
Own EIS vendor strategy, performance, and governance, ensuring value realization, alignment to business outcomes, and architectural compliance.
Set and enforce engineering standards across onshore/offshore teams.
Drive improved delivery predictability, quality, and platform reliability.
Own core-platform risk management for EIS, including technology, security, regulatory, and operational risk.
Ensure EIS platform compliance with security and data privacy requirements and SOX, audit, and regulatory controls.
Own incident management, root cause analysis, and production stability for EIS.
Define, review, and act on platform health KPIs with executive stakeholders (uptime, defect leakage, performance, release success).
Participate in architecture review boards and IT governance forums.
Serve as the IT counterpart to business and product leadership for all EIS matters.
Translate business requirements into technical solutions and delivery plans.
Influence executive and senior business leadership decisions by clearly communicating risks, constraints, and architectural tradeoffs.
Represent the Core Insurance Platform in enterprise architecture, risk, and planning forums.
Enable business agility by providing stable, extensible core platform capabilities.