KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Enterprise Technology Vision & Strategy
- Partner with CXOs and business leaders to align technology investments with customer needs, regulatory requirements, and distribution goals
- Develop enterprise-wide strategies, roadmaps, and high-level architecture designs that balance current and future business needs with industry trends, competitive pressures, and organizational realities
- Drive innovation and agility via composable, cloud-native architectures powering critical journeys (onboarding, underwriting, issuance, servicing, claims)
Enterprise Architecture & Platform Modernization
Establishes enterprise-wide governance through policies and guidelines for technology selection, development, and implementation. Defines current and target state architectures across Business, Application, AI & Information, Security, and Infrastructure domains—supported by actionable roadmaps to enable seamless modernization. Promotes reusable patterns and standardized frameworks to reduce complexity, maintain architectural integrity, and optimize costs. Continuously evolves architecture practices to align with changing business needs, delivery models, and innovation goals
§ Business Architecture – Translates business objectives into operational models that enable new digital products, ecosystem partnerships, and customer-centric growth. Structures value streams, capabilities, and processes to support omnichannel experiences, improve agility, and accelerate time-to-market
§ Application Architecture – Enables modular, composable platforms using microservices, SOA, and low-code accelerators to support scalable, rapid delivery of customer, agent, and partner-facing applications across sales, onboarding, servicing, and claims
§ AI & Information Architecture – Architects production-grade AI/GenAI solutions including RAG, multi-agent systems, and conversational bots. Designs real-time, multi-modal data platforms and governs enterprise data flow, lineage, and streaming to power use cases like mortality risk scoring, underwriting support, customer 360, and sentiment-driven servicing—ensuring trust, transparency, and compliance
§ Integration Architecture – Standardize APIs, events and orchestration using event-driven models for policy systems, CRMs, CDP, TPAs, health & wellness partners and digital channels
§ Security Architecture – Implements Zero Trust, IAM frameworks, and data protection by design to safeguard sensitive customer, health, and financial data. Ensure compliance with IRDAI regulations and evolving cyber risk standards across digital platforms
§ Infrastructure Architecture – Modernizes legacy systems through hybrid cloud and containerized platforms. Supports scalable, resilient, and automated infrastructure for high-availability workloads, including policy servicing, claims processing, and AI inference at scale
Engineering Excellence – Building a World-Class Engineering Organization
Establish and scale a world-class engineering function based on global tech benchmarks, leveraging a modern mix of COTS, custom apps, cloud-native microservices, and data platforms — delivering secure, scalable, and future-ready platforms
Agile Delivery & Scalable Execution Models
§ Institutionalize full-stack engineering and agile-at-scale delivery across all verticals, including estimation, resource planning, cost & velocity tracking, and plan vs. actual forecasting.
§ Operate a skill-based engineering pool optimized for over 100% utilization, ensuring productivity and cross-functional scalability.
§ Standardize platform delivery on secure cloud-native architectures (microservices, APIs, event-driven patterns) deployed across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. Integrate DevSecOps and test automation to accelerate delivery, improve quality, and reduce cost per story point
§ Promote reusability, scalability, and compliance through consistent engineering practices and industrialized delivery pipelines
§ Enable rapid experimentation with emerging technologies and support scaling of viable solutions
§ Own and optimize technology budgets, ensuring cost-effective investments and resource allocation aligned with strategic priorities. Manage engineering capacity planning and vendor relationships to maximize productivity and ROI
§ Transform the way the Engineering is executed with emphasis on AI driven engineering with 40% lower engineering effort and faster time to Market.
Engineering Governance, Platform Ops & Automation:
§ Enforce engineering rigor throughout the lifecycle—from design to testing and SIT/UAT—using gated controls for traceability and compliance
§ Embed CI/CD, GitOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, and observability in pipelines to enable autonomous releases, faster MTTR, and operational visibility
§ Implement SRE principles and shift-left security to deliver self-healing, audit-ready platforms with built-in resilience and security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
Talent Development, Leadership & Organization Building
§ Build and lead high-performing architecture and engineering teams across domains, focusing on capability development, succession planning, and talent retention
§ Establish specialized career paths, leadership coaching, and upskilling programs to deepen expertise in architecture, AI, engineering, and emerging technologies
§ Foster a culture of innovation, engineering excellence, continuous learning, and accountability—anchored in diversity and an AI-first mindset
§ Partner with HR to institutionalize digital talent strategies, L&D frameworks, and retention initiatives to enhance the employee value proposition
Communication & Stakeholder Management
§ Serve as a bridge between the C-suite, business functions, and technical teams, translating complex technical concepts into business-aligned language
§ Collaborate with CDO, CTO, Chief Risk Officer, Heads of Distribution, and Compliance to ensure technology aligns with regulatory and risk frameworks (e.g., IRDAI norms)
§ Represent the architecture vision in steering committees, board meetings, and external partner forums.
Measures of Success:
§ Architecture Compliance & Modernization: Ensure enterprise architecture adherence, accelerate platform rationalization, and increase portfolio sustainability from 70% to 85%
§ Platform Performance & Resilience: Achieve 99.99% uptime for critical applications (up from 99.57%), optimize response times and auto-scaling efficiency, and strengthen security posture through observability, AIOps, and AI-enabled operations management
§ Engineering Quality & DevOps Maturity: Improve Tier 1 & 2 delivery on-time rate from 75% to 90%, raise testing automation and coverage from 50% to 90%, expand DevSecOps coverage to 100%, and enhance CI/CD adoption and UAT stability
§ Business Alignment: Maintain high stakeholder satisfaction, ensure alignment with business priorities, and increase delivery confidence by focusing product and platform engineering on agility and resilience
§ Talent Health & Capability: Increase insourcing of specialized talent from 15% to 70%, boost engineering engagement and capability maturity, and strengthen leadership pipeline and retention
§ Operational Efficiency: Increase self-healing IT operations from 15% to 80%, reduce planned downtime by 50% (from over 200 hours), and implement parallel production-like environments to improve reliability and availability
§ Bring the costs of Development down by 30%
Key Relationships (Internal /External):
Internal:
COO, CDO, CTO, CFO, Strategy Head, Channel Heads, PI & UW Leadership, Legal & Compliance, Product engineering team, PMO, Customer service teams
External:
Technology service providers
Vendors
Consultants
