Assistant Vice President - Infrastructure & Operations

Company:
NICO National Indemnity Company
Want to work for a company with unparalleled financial strength and stability that offers “large company” benefits with an exciting, friendly, and “small company” atmosphere? Our companies, as members of the Berkshire Hathaway group of Insurance Companies, provides opportunities for professionals interested in just that.
National Indemnity Company, a commercial P&C insurance company, has an immediate opening in our corporate headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska for an Assistant Vice President of Infrastructure & Operations to lead all areas of infrastructure, managing teams that support all new and ongoing support of systems. This proven leader will support all facets of our operations including internal teams, agency partners, and insured customers in a hybrid on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. This role encompasses the strategic planning and development of methodologies and approaches to support the business needs as well as creation of technology strategies to continually improve performance. This leader will bring technical credibility, operational discipline, and change leadership required to evolve a stable, traditional environment into a more secure, scalable, and cloud-enabled operating model.
About the Role
Dimensions:
This role reports directly to the CIO
Regular full time staff of 50+ people in addition to 10+ third party contractor resources
20+ major business applications supporting 5,000+ insurance agency end users and home office staff. Platforms consist of both internally developed and third-party package software applications.
Responsibilities:
Leadership and Management
Lead the Infrastructure & Operations organization of approximately 70 people across service desk, platform, networking, cloud engineering, legacy platform engineering, and related infrastructure functions.
Drive the transition from traditional on-prem infrastructure toward a more cloud-forward, secure, and flexible operating model.
Strengthening alignment between Infrastructure & Operations and Security, with an eye toward future security leadership needs.
Help introduce stronger change management, governance, strategic planning, and execution discipline into the I&O function.
Develop and uplevel internal leaders and teams while balancing NICO’s culture of promoting from within with the need for external transformation leadership.
Application Governance, Strategy and Delivery
Oversee cloud modernization efforts, including Azure landing zone maturity, data center migration planning, platform/networking modernization, and cloud operations capability building.
Become a trusted advisor to business stakeholders and customers to understand their needs in order to deliver solutions with strong customer and business value within reasonable time frames.
Partner with application, data, PMO, portfolio, security, and software engineering leaders to support the broader modernization and organizational design agenda.
Support organizational design evolution, including the use of Team Topologies concepts to improve flow, delivery speed, and alignment between architecture and operating model.
Collaboration and Continuous Improvement
Bridge infrastructure, operations, and security in a cloud-first environment, with the potential to assume broader security leadership over time.
Partner with the CIO and senior technology leaders to shape a more flexible, scalable, and composable technology organization that supports business growth and broader Berkshire Hathaway collaboration.
Define and deploy transformational IT capabilities in the development teams. Provide technology vision and leadership and cultivate a culture of innovation, empowerment, and accountability.
Bring change leadership and organizational maturity to a historically stable, engineering-oriented technology culture.
Requirements of the Role
Behaviors and Competencies
Lead a critical infrastructure and operations modernization agenda at a stable, respected Berkshire Hathaway company.
Shape the future of cloud, security, architecture, and infrastructure at a company still in the early stages of a major transformation journey.
Inherit a strong, stable, long-tenured team and help evolve its capabilities for a more cloud-forward future.
Work directly with the CIO on long-term organizational design, succession planning, and the potential evolution toward broader CTO/security leadership scope.
Join a culture known for stability, ethics, long-term career runway, and no layoffs or downsizing.
Help enable broader collaboration across Berkshire Hathaway companies through more flexible, composable technology capabilities.
Education and Training
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or MIS or related field or equivalent in education and experience
Skills
Strong communication skills with a proven ability to understand key concepts and communicate effectively with technical staff, business stakeholders and senior management
Proven ability to communicate technical concepts to nontechnical people to enhance understanding and drive decisions that lead to positive outcomes
Proven ability to collaborate, build relationships and influence individuals at all levels in a matrix-management environment as well as external vendors and service providers
Strong organizational skills with the ability to perform under pressure and manage multiple priorities with competing demands for resources
Strong analytical, data-processing and problem-solving skills
Proficiency in process formulation and improvement
Advanced interpersonal skills including negotiation and conflict resolution skills (oral, written, and presentation)
Strong personnel management and team facilitation skills
Knowledge
Deep Infrastructure & Operations leadership experience, ideally with a career path that began in operations, systems, infrastructure, cloud, or related technical disciplines and broadened into enterprise leadership.
Demonstrated experience leading cloud migration or cloud modernization, preferably in an insurance, financial services, or similarly regulated environment.
Strong technical depth across cloud, infrastructure, security, architecture, data center migration, platform/networking, and modern operations practices.
Credible cybersecurity experience, with the depth to shape security strategy and bridge infrastructure, operations, and security in a cloud-first environment.
Experience leading and developing large, long-tenured technology teams through meaningful modernization and change.
Ability to speak the language of both business and technology, teach and upskill the organization, and translate modernization priorities into practical execution plans.
Architecture or enterprise architecture depth is preferred; ability to help shape a composable architecture and business API strategy is a plus.
Experience
15+ years related work experience
10+ years professional experience in technology leadership roles including setting priorities and plans to meet business objectives in teams of 50+ staff
Experience leading delivery of multiple complex business technology solutions into production that have met or surpassed business objectives
Experience transitioning and leading an organization from a traditional on-prem environment toward a more modern, cloud-enabled infrastructure.
Experience managing software vendors and outsourced service providers
Experience with continuous delivery and continuous integration
Experience with system architecture and technical design
Experience developing and implementing data security strategies
We want you to be involved! We offer Employee Resource Groups for volunteering, connecting with others, social gatherings, and professional development. We also regularly seek employees input through companywide surveys.
We care about your health and wellbeing! Our Wellness program is integrated into the Company culture with an online wellness portal that offers a year-round, one-stop-shop to manage and track all areas of health, our Omaha office boasts a complimentary state-of-the-art onsite fitness center, and a robust wellness program.
Benefits, Perks and more! We offer retirement and savings plan with immediate enrollment with 100% employer match up to 5%, Medical, Dental and Vision for regular, full-time employees and eligible dependents, a dedicated Learning & Development program for employees to grow personally and professionally, 100% upfront Educational Reimbursement program, subsidized downtown parking, competitive time off policies including parental leave, an Employee Assistance program and much more!