VP, Insurance Operations (Hybrid)

Selective Insurance Company of America•Short Hills, NJ

3d•$206,000 - $266,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Vice President, Insurance Operations is accountable for improving the operational foundations of underwriting to improve profitability, execution discipline, and decision quality across the Commercial Lines portfolio. The leader will drive economically grounded productivity and data‑enabled decisions that strengthen underwriting performance, reduce operational risk, and enable Selective to scale profitably with discipline and confidence. The VP, Operations partners closely with Underwriting, Finance, IT, Actuarial, Advanced Analytics, HR, and Enterprise Risk Management to translate strategy into disciplined execution grounded in economics, data, and operational reality.

Requirements

Demonstrated expertise in evaluating and optimizing complex underwriting or insurance operating systems, including diagnosing performance constraints, root causes, and inefficiencies across people, process, data, and technology.
Strong systems‑thinking and economic orientation, with the ability to translate operational activity into output‑ and cost‑based measures, identify leverage points, and drive sustained performance improvement through coordinated system changes.
Fluency in data, analytics, and technology as system enablers, with experience using operational data, analytics, and AI to instrument workflows, improve visibility, and enhance decision quality across the underwriting lifecycle.
Ability to design roles, decision rights, operating rhythms, and team capabilities to ensure the optimized system performs consistently and scales over time.
College degree preferred
10+ years experience in operation-oriented roles
Senior leadership experience in insurance operations, underwriting operations, or closely related finance, analytics, or transformation roles.
Experience building, leading, and developing high‑performing teams.
Sound judgment, high accountability, and credibility with senior executives.

Responsibilities

Strengthen underwriting operations by delivering improved productivity, execution discipline, and operational visibility
Identify operational process improvements to the service model to ensure organizational effectiveness & efficiency. Evaluate and prioritize opportunities and oversee execution of solutions. Continuously assess strength of operational processes and procedures to create consistency across commercial lines and automate or remove low value tasks.
Improve profitability and portfolio diversification by removing unnecessary friction from underwriting processes and improving new business execution. Improve submission‑to‑quote timeliness and underwriting throughput by simplifying processes and clarifying priorities.
Partner with business and functional leaders to identify and communicate key strategies, initiatives, opportunities, metrics, and goals that effectively drive and improve business performance as well as implement initiatives to address issues.
Elevate the quality, consistency, and usefulness of executive operational and financial summaries to improve senior‑level decision‑making.
Ensure operational insights are tightly linked to financial outcomes, planning, and performance management.
Establish a partnership with business, functional leaders, and senior management and develop a clear understanding of their business needs and issues. Perform detailed analytical review of business units/segments to identify, evaluate and pursue opportunities to increase revenue & productivity (capacity/staffing models), improve efficiency and reduce costs
Operate at a strategic, tactical, and operational level, handling the oversight of projects that do not neatly fit within the Commercial Lines organizational chart or that fall between departments.