Director, Core Infrastructure

If you’re passionate about being part of a dynamic organization that enables a Fortune 100 company with nearly $70 billion in annual sales to drive innovation and adopt new technologies that deliver business results, then Nationwide’s Technology team could be the place for you! At Nationwide®, “on your side” goes beyond just words. Our customers are at the center of everything we do and we’re looking for associates who are passionate about delivering extraordinary care.

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Position overview

The Director, Core Infrastructure is a hands-on leader responsible for the reliability, resilience, performance, operational discipline, and continuous improvement of Nationwide’s core infrastructure capabilities in India. This role leads a broad, multidisciplinary portfolio spanning Mainframe, Network, Telephony, Compute, Storage, Database, Middleware, Containers, and FinOps, while partnering closely with Cloud, Security, Architecture, Application, and business teams.

The successful candidate combines strong technical judgment with a positive, people-centered leadership style. They will be comfortable engaging at both strategic and technical levels, and passionate about developing, coaching, and recognizing people so the organization builds durable capability for the future.

Key responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day delivery and operational performance across the core infrastructure portfolio for Nationwide India
• Liaise and coordinate with Nationwide US leadership team and frontline staff
• Establish clear priorities, service expectations, ownership models, and escalation paths across participating teams.
• Maintain a strong focus on availability, resilience, capacity, performance, recoverability, security, and compliance.
• Provide hands-on leadership during complex incidents, problem investigations, major changes, and service-improvement initiatives.
• Drive standardization, automation, lifecycle management, modernization, and reduction of operational toil.
• Partner with architecture and engineering leaders to shape practical, scalable infrastructure road maps.
• Build disciplined practices for monitoring, observability, configuration management, patching, vulnerability remediation, disaster recovery, and technical debt reduction.
• Strengthen FinOps practices by improving cost transparency, forecasting, demand management, utilization, and accountability across infrastructure services.
• Coordinate dependencies across Mainframe, Network, Compute, Storage, Database, Middleware, and Containers to deliver integrated outcomes rather than isolated technology improvements.
• Develop trusted relationships with internal partners, vendors, and service providers.
• Translate business needs into clear technical priorities, delivery plans, risks, and decisions for senior leadership.
• Ensure operational processes and technical solutions support Nationwide’s risk-management, governance, and audit expectations.

People leadership expectations

• Create a positive, inclusive, and accountable team environment.
• Coach individuals through regular feedback, career conversations, mentoring, and meaningful development opportunities.
• Build a strong bench of technical and operational talent through delegation, stretch assignments, knowledge sharing, and succession planning.
• Recognize contributions and reinforce behaviors that improve customer outcomes, teamwork, and reliability.
• Lead through change with transparency, empathy, consistency, and a bias toward constructive problem solving.
• Encourage healthy challenge, learning from incidents, and continuous improvement without blame.

Required qualifications and experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Significant experience leading infrastructure engineering or operations teams in a complex enterprise environment.
• Demonstrated experience across multiple core infrastructure domains, with sufficient depth to guide technical decisions and challenge assumptions.
• Experience leading critical incidents, operational reviews, service improvements, and cross-functional delivery.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure reliability, security, resilience, capacity, performance, and lifecycle management.
• Proven ability to coach and develop technical professionals and first-line leaders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical issues to senior and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working with distributed teams, external partners, and global operating models.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in a regulated, highly available, or financial-services environment.
• Experience with infrastructure automation, observability, platform engineering, and modern operational practices.
• Experience managing budgets, vendor relationships, service providers, and technology road maps.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure and hybrid technology environments.
• Experience establishing or improving FinOps, IT service management, or reliability engineering practices.

Leadership profile

We are seeking a leader who is technically credible, calm under pressure, optimistic, collaborative, and committed to making the people and the platform better every day. The right candidate brings energy to difficult problems, stays close enough to the work to understand reality, and creates an environment where people can do their best work.

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Job Description Summary

If you’re enthusiastic about delivering secure technological solutions to support a company providing extraordinary care to its customers, then Nationwide Technology is the place for you. Nationwide's industry-leading technology workforce embraces an agile work environment and a collaborative culture to deliver outstanding solutions and results. If that sounds like something you aspire to, we want to hear from you!

The Director of Technology Engineering leads a team of infrastructure engineers involved in the analysis, design, development and implementation of hardware/software. You’ll determine hardware/software systems requirements, authorize and oversee systems hardware/software design; plan projects; establish priorities and monitor progress. You’ll also evaluate project status and resource utilization and implement changes to improve the staff's effectiveness. The ability to ensuring project completion, on time and on budget, is essential. You’ll also need the ability to generate hardware/software systems engineering policies, standards, and procedures. You also may mentor associates who are not members of your core team.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities:

• Directs a staff that delivers on build and operational (build and run) components for the product(s) aligned to a technology area, such as but not limited to, consulting, managing and development of new products, upgrade/patching efforts, annual budgeting, efficiency efforts, etc. and the function responsible for driving a competitive unit cost through efficient product lifecycle.

• Responsible for applying secure software and systems engineering practices throughout the delivery lifecycle to ensure our data and technology solutions are protected from threats and vulnerabilities.

• Leads a team accountable for product delivery and the first line of defense for risk and security management.

• Oversee the design, development, modification and implementation of products and processes to aid in the overall product lifecycle and operational metrics.

• Directs staff who are accountable for product management across platforms (on-premises, off-premises and across premises) by providing engineering support for products/processes to improve productivity and reduce cost.

• Demonstrates user empathy by partnering with user advocates to understand and incorporate user sentiment.

• Understands and manages team skill maturity in context of effective product management.

• Oversee vendor management/relationships and sourcing, in collaboration with Technology Product Manager.

• Drives release cadence and business feature alignment leveraging automation to drive speed and actively drives continuous process improvement activities including Lean, process/product innovation, quality, cost reduction and other initiatives.

• Leads people through guidance and support on the execution of work; management of associates including but not limited to performance management, salary planning, training, development, workforce planning, hiring, and disciplinary actions; and attracts, hires, engages and develops the team through impactful recruitment, coaching and feedback.

• Participates in strategic initiatives/planning for core products including products that cross Technologies.

• Develops and manages project budgets and deployment.

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Qualifications & Experience:

Education:
Undergraduate studies in computer science, management information systems, mathematics, or related field is strongly preferred.

Experience:
Ten years knowledge of project management concepts and techniques. Experience leading multiple teams and assets across various technology platforms. Three years of management experience is preferred.

Technical Skills:

• Business Acumen

• Business Strategies

• Computer Science

• Financial Management

• IT Infrastructure

• Technical Acumen

• Vendor Management

• Technology Strategies

Soft Skills & Attributes:

• Expert communication skills

• Ability to influence, negotiate, and set priorities

• Mentoring and coaching abilities to guide associates

• Identifying and removing blockers to progress

• Ability to work in agile and global environments

• Insurance/financial services industry knowledge a plus

• Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence

Additional Information:

Reporting Structure:

Reports to Technology Executive – India

Working Hours:

Aligned to India business hours with flexibility for global collaboration.

Location Flexibility:

[Hybrid/Remote/In-office] with periodic in-office collaboration.

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Nationwide is committed to diversity and inclusion. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, gender, disability, religion, or other protected categories.

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