Senior Data Applications Manager

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 summary:

We are looking for a Team Lead in India to build and lead a newly formed multidisciplinary team supporting our Barcelona-based organization. The Team Lead will combine people management and hands-on technical leadership, driving delivery across data transformation initiatives, legacy-to-modern migrations, and platform/application support. This role is accountable for hiring, team performance, engineering standards, and reliable operations, while partnering closely with European stakeholders. Practical, responsible use of AI assistants (e.g., Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT) is expected to improve delivery speed and quality.

Key responsibilities:

• Build and lead the team: hire, onboard, coach, and develop Data Engineers and Platform/Application Engineers; set clear expectations and foster a strong team culture.
• Own delivery outcomes: plan and execute work across transformation projects, migrations, and support activities; ensure commitments are met and risks are managed proactively.
• Technical leadership & standards: define and enforce engineering best practices (coding standards, testing, reviews, documentation, CI/CD, IaC where applicable).
• Drive modernization: support and coordinate migration efforts from legacy services to the modern stack, aligning priorities with EU stakeholders.
• Operational excellence: establish strong support practices (incident/problem/change), monitoring habits, and runbooks; drive continuous reliability improvements.
• Hiring process ownership: run technical interviews, define/adjust assessments, calibrate skills and seniority, and provide hiring recommendations.
• Cross-location collaboration: ensure effective collaboration with Europe via shared agile ceremonies, transparency on progress, and strong stakeholder communication.
• AI-enabled ways of working: promote responsible use of AI tools to accelerate troubleshooting, automation, documentation, and software quality

Must-have qualifications:

• Proven experience leading technical teams with people management responsibilities (performance, feedback, coaching).
• Strong hands-on background in Python and modern engineering practices (version control, CI/CD, testing, documentation).
• Solid understanding of data engineering and data transformation concepts (SQL, modeling, pipelines; dbt familiarity preferred).
• Experience with cloud environments (Azure and/or AWS) and collaboration with platform/operations functions.
• Strong grasp of operations/support processes (incident/problem/change) and reliability mindset.
• Demonstrable experience using AI assistants in daily engineering work with concrete examples.
• Strong communication skills; comfortable working with distributed teams and stakeholders.

Nice-to-have

• Experience leading teams that cover both data engineering and platform/application services.
• Exposure to Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) and observability/monitoring practices.
• Experience in migration programs (legacy to modern stack) and/or vendor-transition contexts.

Candidate Data Privacy Notice:

Applicability of This Notice This job posting relates to opportunities with Zurich Digital International Private Ltd. (Zurich) and is published with the support of ANSR Inc., (ANSR) an authorized recruitment service provider engaged by Zurich for its hiring activities.

Participation in the Recruitment Process : When you apply for this role, personal data provided as part of your application (such as your name, email address, contact details, address, financial information, background information, medical history, and details of previous employers/employment) is collected for the purposes of recruitment and selection and may be reviewed by Zurich, and transferred/disclosed to Zurich's affiliates, subsidiaries, and related entities and ANSR (Transferees), solely for recruitment and selection purposes (in accordance with their respective privacy policies).

The Transferees maintain at least the same level of protection for your data as maintained by Zurich, and do not further transfer/disclose/share or publish your data.