VP, Insurance Operations; Hybrid

About Us

At Selective, we don't just insure uniquely, we employ uniqueness. Selective is a midsized U.S. domestic property and casualty insurance company with a history of strong, consistent financial performance for nearly 100 years. Selective's unique position as both a leading insurance group and an employer of choice is recognized in a wide variety of awards and honors, including listing in Forbes Best Midsize Employers in 2025 and certification as a Great Place to Work in 2025 for the sixth consecutive year.

Employees are empowered and encouraged to Be Uniquely You by being their true, unique selves and contributing their diverse talents, experiences, and perspectives to our shared success. Together, we are a high‑performing team working to serve our customers responsibly by helping to mitigate loss, keep them safe, and restore their lives and businesses after an insured loss occurs.

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.

• 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.

Knowledge and 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,…