Head of Underwriting Design Lab

Position Summary

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 needs, and progress against milestones.
• Create a high-performing, empowered team culture that encourages speed, thoughtful risk taking, rigorous feedback loops, accountability, and transparent decision making.

You Have

• A minimum of 10+ years of experience in financial services, insurance, transformation, operations, strategy, digital product, underwriting, or related disciplines; Life and/or Disability insurance experience strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex, cross-functional transformation efforts that require business process redesign, technology delivery, data/model enablement, change management, and executive stakeholder alignment.
• Strong product and operating-model instincts, with the ability to translate ambiguous strategic ambition into clear roadmaps, requirements, milestones, governance, and day-to-day execution rhythms.
• Experience working with AI, automation, data science, digital product, or technology teams; direct experience with underwriting automation, third-party data, evidence orchestration, or model-enabled decisioning is a plus.
• Ability to partner effectively across risk, compliance, legal, privacy, security, architecture, distribution, finance, talent, operations, and business leadership to resolve constraints without losing speed.
• Executive presence and communication skills, including the ability to frame trade-offs, influence senior stakeholders, run governance forums, and translate technical or regulatory complexity into practical business decisions.
• A track record of building strong teams, attracting and developing talent, managing internal and external partners, and creating a culture of accountability and high performance.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, balancing test-and-learn experimentation with the discipline required to graduate capabilities into durable, scalable operating environments.
• An execution-oriented mindset with a bias toward simplification, measurable outcomes, customer/advisor impact, and enterprise value creation.
• Leadership gravitas, curiosity, and the ability to inspire a team around a bold future-state vision while maintaining practical focus on near-term delivery.

Salary Range:

$178,690.00 - $293,560.00

The salary range reflected above is a good faith estimate of base pay for the primary location of the position. The salary for this position ultimately will be determined based on the education, experience, knowledge, and abilities of the successful candidate. In addition to salary, this role may also be eligible for annual, sales, or other incentive compensation.

Our Promise

At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals.  Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards.

Inspire Well-Being

As part of Guardian’s Purpose – to inspire well-being – we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues. Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits. Benefits apply to full-time eligible employees. Interns are not eligible for most Company benefits.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Guardian is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to age, race, color, creed, religion, sex, affectional or sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, marital status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other classification protected by applicable law.

Accommodations

Guardian is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. Guardian also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified job applicants (and employees) to accommodate the individual's known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless doing so would create an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact MyHR@glic.com. Please note: this resource is for accommodation requests only. For all other inquires related to your application and careers at Guardian, refer to the Guardian Careers site.

Visa Sponsorship

Guardian Life is not currently or in the foreseeable future sponsoring employment-based visas (e.g., such as an H-1B). In order to be a successful applicant, you must be legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship/support now or at any time in the future.

Notice Regarding Guardian’s Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment

 

As part of Guardian’s job application process, Guardian may use artificial intelligence tools (“AI Tools") to automate the sorting and filtering of information provided by applicants as part of its preliminary screening. This preliminary screening may be used to help identify applicant materials and resumes relative to their indication that the applicant meets the requirements for the specific job for which they are applying, as specified in the listing posted on Guardian’s jobs website (Careers at Guardian at https://www.guardianlife.com/careers). At Guardian, we do not use AI Tools to substantially assist or replace human judgment or discretionary decision making in our hiring process. All hiring decisions will be made by Guardian colleagues.

 

Please be aware that if you apply for a specific position with Guardian, you will have the choice of opting out of Guardian’s use of AI Tools during the job application process. If you would like to request an alternative process that does not utilize AI Tools or would like to request a reasonable accommodation, within ten business days of your position application, you must email your request to MyHR@glic.com, making sure to provide your name and job requisition identification number. Guardian will retain your applicant materials and resume and all information therefrom in accordance with Guardian’s document retention policy, a copy of which you may request via MyHR@glic.com.

 

Additionally, at applicable times, Guardian will make public the most recent bias audit results for such AI tools, which may be found here. 

Current Guardian Colleagues: Please apply through the internal Jobs Hub in Workday.