Head of Underwriting Design Lab

Head Of Underwriting Design Lab

The Head of Underwriting Design Lab is a newly created leadership position charged with leading Guardian's highly visible lab-based approach to underwriting transformation across the Life and Disability businesses. You will report directly to the Head of Business Operations and Experience who is part of the Financial Protection and Retirement Solutions (FPRS) leadership team.

This leader will shape and run the dedicated Underwriting Design Lab, bringing together Underwriting, New Business Operations, Technology, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Product Management, Product, Risk, Legal, Compliance, Talent, and Finance, amongst other critical stakeholders to redesign the end-to-end purchase and underwriting journey. While some resources will report directly to the Head of Underwriting Design Lab, others will have a dotted line reporting relationship.

This program is part of Guardian Labs, an enterprise-wide initiative established to elevate, and increase investment in end-to-end transformation across several strategic imperatives. In addition to collaborating with internal teams, each Guardian Lab will engage closely with external strategic partners to unlock velocity and unconstrained thinking.

The role will focus on moving Guardian beyond incremental automation of existing processes toward AI-native workflows that leverage third-party data to simplify the client and advisor experiences, improve underwriting outcomes, increase straight-through processing, reduce manual work and handoffs, and create a scalable path to industry best underwriting capabilities. Most importantly, a redesigned and simplified underwriting experience will unlock new product innovation and new distribution channel exploration, accelerating growth across Guardian's Life and Disability businesses.

You will define the lab mandate, operating model, roadmap, product direction, and stakeholder engagement model while ensuring the team can test, learn, prototype, and ultimately graduate capabilities into Guardian's core environment. This leader will be accountable for translating Guardian's underwriting ambition into executable product and process design, including expanded third-party data use, contemporary and product-agnostic applications, advisor-led purchase experiences, machine-learning-driven risk assessment and pricing, underwriter tools, and always-on underwriting.

You Will

• Stand up and lead Guardian's Underwriting Design Lab, including the lab mandate, goals, operating norms, governance routines, ways of working, and success measures.
• Serve as the day-to-day transformation lead and product-direction owner for the lab, unblocking business and technology barriers, allocating resources, and driving decisions needed to maintain momentum.
• In partnership with AI business partners, translate the underwriting transformation vision into a sequenced roadmap that balances short-term prototypes with a practical graduation path into Guardian environments, platforms, controls, and production-ready capabilities.
• Oversee end-to-end redesign of the Life and Disability underwriting and purchase journey, spanning intake, evidence, risk assessment, decisioning, offer presentation, issuance, and post-issue engagement.
• Manage a dedicated team of colleagues across Underwriting, New Business Operations, Data Science, Applied AI, Technology Architecture, Application Development, and Business Transformation.
• Partner closely with colleagues across Risk, Compliance, Legal, Finance, Talent, Product, Distribution, and Experience Design to resolve process, data, model, regulatory, and adoption questions early and identify key skills and capabilities needed for future state.
• Build and manage deep collaboration with external AI / agentic partners and internal Guardian SMEs, ensuring partners understand customer needs, business requirements, integration constraints, privacy/security expectations, and measurable value outcomes.
• Accountable for design of lab's product backlog and prioritization process, including PRDs, acceptance criteria, release sequencing, prototype demos, pilot success criteria, and executive-ready progress reporting.
• Create a disciplined test-and-learn model that uses advisor, underwriter, operations, and client feedback to refine workflows, improve usability, and strengthen adoption before broader rollout.
• Drive delivery of transformational capabilities such as expanded third-party data use, dynamic application pre-fill, intelligent evidence orchestration, ML-supported risk scoring and pricing, automated decisioning, underwriter command-center tooling, and always-on underwriting engagement.
• Establish clear financial and operational value tracking across client friction, advisor productivity, process automation, combo experience, risk outcomes, and new product / market opportunities.
• Represent the lab in FPRS and enterprise governance forums, surfacing key decisions, risks, dependencies, trade-offs, funding…