Wholesale Operations Leader - GRS North America

Summary:

As the Wholesale Operations Leader, you will lead cross-functional work to deliver innovative solutions, streamline operational protocols, and drive consistency and process excellence across the GRS North America Wholesale segment. This role partners closely with Wholesale business unit leaders, Office of Underwriting, Finance, Actuarial & Data Science, Legal, Claims, Field Operations, Technology, and other functional partners to support operational strategies that enable segment priorities.

The Wholesale Operations Leader serves as the connective tissue between strategy and execution, helping shape Wholesale strategy and translate it into sequenced, resourced plans with clear owners, outcomes, and measurable business impact. This role will engineer the submission-to-quote pipeline as a measurable operating system, improve broker connectivity, embed AI-enabled capabilities into the underwriting workflow, and build the data and P&L infrastructure needed to make Wholesale performance visible at the segment level. The role will help free business leaders to focus on underwriting and market activity by reducing operational friction, improving reporting, and driving disciplined execution.

Responsibilities:

• Through a strategic and operational lens, lead cross-functional work to drive a collaborative, agile, high-performing culture and operating model that is principled, profitable, innovative, and nimble.
• Serve as a strategic thought partner to the Wholesale segment leader — contributing to the formation of segment strategy, not only its execution — including portfolio direction, distribution strategy, and growth priorities across E&S lines.
• Serve as Wholesale Operations Leader, representing Wholesale in Office of Underwriting, operations, product, data, and technology forums to ensure Ironshore’s needs are built into roadmaps, not accommodated after the fact.
• Engineer the submission-to-quote pipeline as a measurable system with defined cycle time targets by business unit — identifying where time dies and building solutions to eliminate it.
• Own broker connectivity as a product decision, supporting API-first integration into broker AMS systems and reducing reliance on additional portals that create friction for brokers and underwriters.
• Make AI infrastructure foundational to the Wholesale operating model, enabling triage, clearance, and appetite scoring before a human touches a submission.
• Own submission-level data as the operating nervous system, including quote ratios, hit rates, cycle times by underwriter and by broker, and other key measures of underwriting and operational performance.
• Translate the six execution workstreams into a sequenced, resourced plan with clear owners, milestones, outcomes, and accountability.
• Build and own the sta