Senior Manager, AI Ops

Talent500 is hiring for one of its clients.

Who are we:

Core Insurance Platforms (CIP) is Zurich's global capability responsible for building, running, and evolving core insurance technology. We set a unified, scalable operating model—covering governance, standards, architecture, service delivery, and reuse—so our business units can deliver at speed and scale.

CIP is the strategic steward of Zurich's Guidewire ecosystem, aligning platform roadmaps to business strategy while driving stability, modernization, reduced supplier dependency, and long term cost efficiency.

India delivery center is one of our global delivery and capability hub. We bring together experts in AI, engineering, analysis, quality, and architecture to deliver product & process solutions, application run services, change and transformation initiatives, and centralized platform services across both on prem and Guidewire Cloud environments. Our teams operate from multiple global delivery centers, supporting Zurich's business units worldwide.

Role: Senior Manager, AI Ops

Value Proposition:

Join the Digital Employee Experience function as a hands-on technical leader shaping how AI transforms IT operations and the employee experience at enterprise scale. As DEX Factory AI Team Leader, you will lead through expertise by setting technical direction, coaching engineers, and personally contributing to the design and delivery of AI solutions used by a broad internal workforce. The role offers the opportunity to influence standards for responsible AI, agentic automation and AI-driven employee experience while working with senior experts across regions to define and implement practical, high-value solutions.

Our Mission Statement:

To reimagine IT operations and the employee experience through AI, delivering intelligent, reliable and secure automation that empowers employees across platforms. The team combines deep technical expertise with a strong focus on measurable value, operational reliability and continuous innovation.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership for the AI engineering team by defining standards, reusable patterns and architectural direction for AI solutions across IT operations and employee experience.
• Lead through expertise, remaining hands-on in design, prototyping, coding and review of critical AI components such as LLM-based agents, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and intelligent automations.
• Own and shape the AI engineering roadmap in collaboration with product owners, architects, security partners and business stakeholders.
• Define how AI will reshape employee experience, translating strategic intent into a clear backlog of initiatives with measurable outcomes.
• Coach, mentor and develop AI engineers, fostering a culture of learning, accountability, engineering excellence and responsible AI adoption.
• Ensure solutions align with enterprise requirements for security, privacy, responsible AI, regulatory awareness and operational reliability, including consideration of EU AI Act principles.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering practices covering code review, CI/CD, MLOps or LLMOps, evaluation frameworks, observability and cost management.
• Represent the team in architecture, governance and cross-functional forums, contributing to enterprise AI standards and reusable capabilities.
• Identify and prioritize high-value automation opportunities across IT operations, employee support and service delivery.
• Partner with platform leads across Windows, Mac, VDI, Mobile and Service Management to embed AI into existing services and experiences.
• Drive continuous improvement using analytics, experimentation, operational feedback and adoption measurement.

Your Skills and Experience:

The ideal candidate is a seasoned AI and software engineering professional who leads primarily through technical credibility and hands-on contribution rather than people management alone. This person is comfortable working in code, discussing architecture with senior stakeholders, coaching engineers and translating operational problems into scalable AI-enabled solutions.

Specific Requirements:

• 6+ years of software and AI engineering experience, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership capacity such as tech lead, staff engineer or similar role.
• Proven track record of delivering AI, ML or Generative AI solutions into production within enterprise environments.
• Deep hands-on expertise with Python and modern AI frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, PyTorch or similar technologies.
• Strong experience designing LLM-based systems including RAG, agentic workflows, tool or function calling, evaluation approaches and guardrails.
• Solid knowledge of cloud AI platforms, with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry preferred; familiarity with AWS Bedrock is advantageous.
• Experience defining architectures that integrate AI capabilities with enterprise systems including ITSM, endpoint management, identity and data platforms.
• Strong understanding of responsible AI, AI security, privacy and relevant regulatory context.
• Experience establishing CI/CD and MLOps or LLMOps practices for AI workloads, ideally using Azure DevOps Repos and Pipelines or equivalent tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to coach engineers, conduct code and design reviews, and raise technical capability across a team.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to connect technical detail to business value.
• University degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• Proficiency in written and spoken English.
• German, Italian or Spanish would be an advantage but are not essential.

Beneficial Skills:

• Experience with multi-agent or agentic AI orchestration patterns.
• Experience in IT operations, endpoint management or digital employee experience domains.
• Familiarity with ServiceNow, Microsoft Intune, Nexthink and the Microsoft 365 or Copilot ecosystem.
• Knowledge of evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, prompt testing and production observability for AI systems.
• Relevant certifications such as Azure AI Engineer, Azure Solutions Architect or ITIL Foundation.
• Experience operating in regulated enterprise environments such as insurance or financial services.

Nature of Work:

The DEX Factory AI Team Leader sets the technical direction for AI engineering while remaining directly involved in critical design and implementation work. The role balances strategic thinking with practical delivery, ensuring that ideas are converted into robust, secure and scalable solutions that automate IT operations and improve employee experience. The role works closely with architecture, security, platform engineering and business stakeholders, and is accountable for engineering quality, responsible AI practices, delivery effectiveness and the technical growth of the team.