About the job
Allied World is an ideal place for talented professionals who are driven by a belief in the value of collaboration and the power of knowledge.
We believe that when our great people work together and support one another, our clients receive the best solutions. We embrace unique perspectives and empower each person to grow through professional development, career training and mentoring programs.
Our people are our most important asset, and we are very proud of the quality of our team members.
Job Summary
This role is for an operator. Someone who thrives on structure, make decisions quickly, and keeps critical systems stable when pressure is high.
As AVP, IT Operations – L2 Application Support, you will lead production support across a 24/7 insurance technology environment supporting policy administration, claims, underwriting, billing, and digital platforms. You will own operational execution for incident management, problem management, service restoration, and production stability.
The environment is fast-moving, highly visible, and accountability driven. Success in this role comes from operational discipline, strong leadership, sound judgment, and the ability to drive measurable improvement across teams and systems.
Location: Islelin, NJ
Work Arrangement: Hybrid – on-site four days per week (Monday–Thursday)
Job Responsibilities:
- Serve as the SME for ServiceNow ITSM processes and operational governance.
- Lead global L2 application support for enterprise insurance platforms operating in a 24/7 environment.
- Drive incident triage, escalation management, service restoration, and post-incident accountability for critical production issues.
- Ensure SLAs, OLAs, and service availability targets are consistently achieved.
- Lead distributed support teams across onshore and offshore models, including shift planning, workload balancing, coaching, and performance management.
- Partner closely with L1 support, L3 product and engineering teams, infrastructure teams, and external vendors to accelerate issue resolution.
- Establish and maintain operational standards including runbooks, knowledge management, support procedures, and escalation paths.
- Drive problem management initiatives focused on reducing recurring incidents, operational friction, and avoidable downtime.
- Oversee monitoring, alerting, observability, and event management practices across supported applications.
- Ensure operational readiness for releases, deployments, and production cutovers.
- Support audit, compliance, and regulatory requirements common within insurance and financial services environments.
- Lead continuous improvement initiatives focused on automation, resiliency, and operational efficiency.
- Provide concise executive-level communication during major incidents and high-severity outages.
What Makes Someone Successful Here:
- You stay calm under pressure and bring clarity during production incidents.
- You can make sound operational decisions with incomplete information.
- You hold teams accountable while building credibility and trust.
- You know how to balance urgency with operational discipline.
- You improve systems, not just react to problems.
Required Experience:
- 10+ years of experience in IT operations, production support, or application support leadership roles.
- Strong background supporting enterprise-scale insurance or financial services environments.
- Proven ownership of mission-critical L2 support functions within high-availability ecosystems.
- Deep understanding of ITIL processes including Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management.
- Experience leading globally distributed support organizations across multiple time zones.
- Strong experience with monitoring platforms, observability tooling, and enterprise ticketing systems.
- Demonstrated success improving service reliability, operational maturity, and MTTR.
