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.

Our opportunity Data Applications Manager:

We are looking for a Data Applications Manager in India to build and lead a focused team with full end-to-end accountability for the operations of data-related applications. The Team Lead combines people management and hands-on technical leadership, with AI-enabled operations at the core: they are expected to personally use AI tools daily and to actively direct the team in applying AI to streamline application management, automate operations, and eliminate repetitive work. This is not an optional skill — it is central to how this role delivers value. The right candidate stays ahead of the AI space — evaluating new tools, integrating relevant advances, and raising the team's AI capability over time.

Your role As a Data Applications Manager, your main responsibilities will involve:

Your Skills and Experience As a Data Applications Manager, your skills and experience must include:

Nice-to-have:

Additional Information Work location is India, Hyderabad, with occasional travel depending on the nature and level of involvement in respective projects. So, if you value an exciting and varied working environment and meet the above requirements, then our recruitment consultant is looking forward to receiving your application.

- Lead, develop,



and grow a team of software engineers focused on L2/L3 application support, automation, and infrastructure as code.
- Own team performance and delivery — set clear expectations, track outcomes, and continuously raise the bar on operational quality and engineering standards.
- Champion AI tool adoption across the team (Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT): establish patterns, share best practices, and set team-level AI utilization targets and track them — measure the proportion of operational tasks that are AI-assisted or automated, and drive continuous improvement against that baseline.
- Act as the primary point of escalation for critical incidents and complex problems — provide technical direction and ensure issues are resolved with full accountability.
- Manage stakeholder relationships across Europe — provide regular operational updates, align on priorities, and represent the team's work credibly at senior levels.
- Drive the team's automation agenda: translate manual operational burden into a structured backlog of automation opportunities, and hold the team accountable for delivering them.
- Oversee the progressive migration of legacy application operations (DB2, SAS, UiPath, Oracle, MicroStrategy) toward modern, automated, and eventually decommissioned states — partnering with European counterparts on roadmap and sequencing.
- Ensure operational resilience: own monitoring coverage, runbook quality, on-call processes, and continuous stability improvement.
- Run agile ceremonies and maintain a well-groomed, prioritized backlog aligned with Europe.
- Champion and build a high-ownership, user-obsessed team culture: model the behaviours you expect — follow-through, proactive communication, and relentless focus on reducing recurrence.
- Foster a culture of experimentation with AI: encourage the team to test current tools, run internal knowledge-sharing sessions, and document effective AI patterns for reuse across the team.




- 3+ years of proven experience leading software engineering or platform operations teams, with direct line management responsibility.
- Technical credibility: hands-on background in application support, automation (Python), and/or infrastructure — able to review work, guide engineers, and contribute to technical decisions.
- Deep, hands-on AI tool usage — Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT or equivalent — with concrete examples of applying AI to troubleshooting, automation scripting, documentation, and code review. The manager must lead by example, not by instruction alone.
- Practical knowledge of prompt engineering in technical contexts — sufficient to guide engineers on how to get quality output from AI tools for operational tasks.
- Awareness of the GenAI landscape — able to evaluate emerging tools and judge which are relevant for the team's workflows without relying on external guidance.
- Demonstrated ability to coach and upskill engineers on AI adoption, with measurable outcomes.
- Strong stakeholder management — comfortable engaging with senior stakeholders across geographies, providing clear operational status and escalation handling.
- Experience running operational processes in an ITIL-aligned environment (incident, problem, change management).
- Servant leadership — able to unblock, develop, and retain technical talent in a distributed team setup.
- Structured thinker — able to break down ambiguity, define clear priorities, and drive execution.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear reporting and documentation for non-technical audiences.
- Resilience and composure under pressure, particularly during major incidents or competing priorities.
- Experience working across time zones with teams in Europe or equivalent.
- Exposure to cloud operations (Azure and/or AWS).
- Familiarity with any of the legacy technologies in scope: DB2, SAS, UiPath, Oracle, MicroStrategy.
- Experience managing teams through a legacy-to-modern migration or platform transformation.
- Exposure to GenAI APIs or LLM-based tooling (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI) — sufficient to assess applicability for operational use cases.
- Experience defining or tracking AI utilization metrics within an engineering team.

📌 Senior Data Applications Manager (Secunderabad)
🏢 Talent 500 by ANSR
📍 Secunderabad