Head of Underwriting Deployment and Governance

Head of Underwriting Deployment and Governance

• Lead the deployment of underwriting strategy at scale, embedding Underwriting Excellence and reshaping how underwriting works through intelligent intervention, automation and best practice to maximise impact where expertise matters most.


• Collaborate with senior stakeholders from Sales and Agency, Underwriting, Pricing and the Agency Network of NFU Mutual to drive sustainable profitable growth and strong customer outcomes.


• Hybrid role with up to 60% homeworking and 40% in Stratford-upon-Avon with travel to regional offices.

About the role

This is a significant senior leadership opportunity to define, lead and embed the deployment of underwriting strategy. You’ll play a key role in leading our underwriting teams to work in the most efficient, effective and confident way. Ensuring they have the right tools, knowledge, processes, and support to make high-quality decisions.

With a strong focus on operational excellence and strategic delivery, you’ll shape how underwriting expertise is applied across the business, setting best practice and driving continuous improvement to deliver consistent commercial, customer and regulatory outcomes.

As a senior leader, you’ll lead and develop a team of four managers and over twenty specialists, embedding Underwriting Excellence through leadership teams. You'll build confidence, strengthen decision-making and enable underwriters to focus on the activity where they add the greatest value, supported by data and insight to drive the quest for truly intelligent intervention.

Collaborating closely with senior leaders and cross-functional partners including Pricing, Sales and Financial Planning, you’ll set the direction for underwriting change, ensuring activity is strategically aligned, prioritised and delivers measurable business impact. You’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the future underwriting operating model, establishing the structures, capabilities and culture required to drive sustained performance and continuous improvement.

You’ll also lead underwriting governance, with accountability for first line oversight in a regulated environment, ensuring robust, proportionate controls aligned to regulatory requirements and business objectives.

About you

You’ll be an experienced General Insurance underwriting leader with strong strategic judgement and a proven ability to deliver change through others. You’ll bring a broad understanding of underwriting operations, ideally including Commercial Lines, with experience of deploying strategy, and the ability to translate business objectives into practical, scalable solutions that drive efficiency, consistency and measurable outcomes.

You’ll bring a strong continuous improvement mindset, driving innovation, embedding learning loops and challenging teams to rethink how underwriting work is delivered, identifying not only what should be done, but what can be simplified or stopped to maximise value. As an inclusive and empowering leader, you’ll inspire and develop leaders and teams through change, fostering a culture of curiosity, accountability and trust where people feel confident to challenge, innovate and perform at their best.

You’ll have experience leading complex change or transformation activity, using structured approaches to planning, prioritisation, monitoring and delivery. You’ll be comfortable working across multiple programmes or initiatives, balancing strategic ambition with operational reality and ensuring activity is focused on the areas that will create the greatest value for customers, colleagues and the business with clear accountability for delivering measurable outcome.

You’ll be a confident and credible senior stakeholder manager, able to build strong relationships, influence across functions and bring people together around a shared direction. You’ll be comfortable working with senior leaders, technical specialists and operational teams, adapting your communication style to make complex information clear, relevant and actionable.

You’ll also need to demonstrate:

• Strong General Insurance underwriting experience, ideally with experience across Commercial Lines.


• Proven experience leading complex change, transformation or continuous improvement activity


• Confidence using data, insight, monitoring and reporting to inform decisions and improve performance.


• A highly collaborative leader, with a proven ability to build alignment and influence senior stakeholders across multiple business areas to deliver shared strategic outcomes.


• Strong leadership capability, including experience leading leaders and developing high-performing teams within General Insurance.


• Experience of governance, regulatory compliance and risk management within a General Insurance environment, with a strong understanding of technical standards, controls and governance frameworks.

At NFU Mutual, we support an inclusive workplace and value all the differences that make us unique. We celebrate the creativity and innovation that comes from diverse perspectives and experiences and share a common vision of doing the right thing for our customers and employees.

We recognise that some candidates may experience barriers during the recruitment process. So, we encourage candidates to discuss any adjustments or accommodations they need to be the best they can be throughout our recruitment process.

We're proud to be a Disability Confident Employer, a Race at Work and Women in Finance Charter signatory and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, regardless of age, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, gender, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic background.

Benefits and Rewards

When you join our team, you can expect a supportive culture and an attractive range of rewards and benefits including:

• Salary circa £120,000


• Annual bonus (up to 33% of salary)


• Car allowance of £7,000


• Contributory pension scheme, up to 20%, including your 8% contribution


• 28 days annual leave + bank holidays + buy/sell/save holiday trading scheme


• A Family Friendly policy that helps you balance your work and family responsibilities


• Private medical insurance family cover


• Access to savings at High Street brands, travel and supermarkets


• £20 contribution to a monthly gym membership – subject to T&Cs


• Health and wellbeing plan - cashback for dentist, opticians, physio and more


• Employee Volunteering - volunteer in the community for one day each year


• Unlimited access to Refer a Friend £500 bonus scheme


• Life Assurance cover of 4 x salary


• Employee discounts of 15% on a range of NFU Mutual insurance policies

Working at NFU Mutual

We’re one of the UK’s leading general insurance and financial services organisations, and for over 110 years we’ve put our customers at the heart of everything we do. Our people are just as important to us, so we’re proud to be recognised as “a great place to work”.

Our Gallup Exceptional Workplace 2026 award was not only awarded with Distinction, but it also marked us as the first UK based company to earn a Gallup Exceptional Workplace award for eleven consecutive years. We’ve also been consistently recognised by Glassdoor. We appeared in the Glassdoor Best Places to Work UK list in 2023, 2024 and 2026 — and in 2026, we were the highest ranked insurance business in the UK, highlighting our strong employee experience and the positive feedback our people share on the platform.

Additionally, we were named in the LinkedIn Top Companies 2026 list of “Best midsize employers to grow your career in the UK”, and we’ve been certified as a UK Top Employer by the Top Employers Institute in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
We offer a supportive and empowering culture where people are inspired to perform, given opportunities to grow, and recognised and rewarded for their contribution. Our people are proud to work for a company that respects them and their communities, and they trust us to be financially sustainable—so we’re successful now and in the future.