HWC HQ Technology Lead

The HWC HQ Technology Lead will build and lead the technology function for IGS, RIC and Marketing businesses within Health Wealth and Career business at WTW. The role owns technology delivery and ongoing support for IGS, RIC and Marketing: shaping the technical solution for transformation initiatives, giving the software a durable home once it goes live, and bringing the many smaller AI projects across RIC onto governed platforms with proper hosting, source control and security review. 

This is a hands-on technology leadership role who work closely with cross-functional leaders to ensure our offerings and ways of working continue to evolve alongside our strategy and growth ambitions

The Role

Building the HWC HQ Technology function

• Stand up the technology function for IGS, RIC and HWC Marketing, with a clear operating model, intake route, RACI and support model for each business, and a defined path for onboarding further HWC HQ businesses if required

• Size, recruit and lead the team, drawing on WTW colleagues, contingent and vendor resources; integrate existing dedicated support teams.

Hands-on technology and architecture leadership

• Should be a very good problem solver with a zeal of exploring new technologies on top of their day-to-day responsibilities.

• Should review architectures, make build, buy or reuse decisions and hold the line on standards, working with HWC Technology, Enterprise Architecture and platform owners.

• Stay close enough to the engineering to be credible. Read and challenge designs, estimates, data models and code reviews, and step in to unblock engineers when delivery stalls.

• Manage dependencies on shared platforms, so that the tools fit the wider HWC estate rather than duplicate it.

AI delivery and adoption

• Lead delivery of AI-enabled solutions across the the businesses: document ingestion and extraction, data validation and anomaly detection, research and survey automation, retrieval-based knowledge tools, agents and workflow automation.

• Choose the right stack for each problem from the approved WTW toolset (Microsoft Foundry and Agent Framework, Copilot Studio, Power Platform and Dataverse, Azure and other approved partners) and decide where to leverage AI.

• Move AI routines and prototypes that live today in personal tools or borrowed environments onto governed platforms, with hosting, version control, monitoring, cost tracking and human-in-the-loop controls.

• Use AI in the team’s own engineering practice, applying coding assistants and agents to raise both throughput and quality.

• Provide environments, tooling and technical guidance for business-led builds

Governance, security and Responsible AI

• Ensure every solution clears InfoSec, Application Security, privacy, legal and Responsible AI review before it reaches users or client data.

• Own cloud subscriptions, environments and consumption for the HQ portfolio, with clear cost attribution by business and by initiative.

• Maintain an application and AI-asset inventory for IGS, RIC and Marketing, with named owners, support models and risk ratings.

Stakeholder, vendor and commercial management

• Be the trusted technology partner to HWC HQ business leaders, turning business ambition into delivery plans and the trade-offs that come with them.

• Run a disciplined intake and prioritisation process that ties each request to measurable value, so the backlog reflects business priorities rather than whichever idea arrived first.

• Prepare budget, headcount and funding cases, and report progress, risk and outcomes to HWC Technology leadership and HWC HQ business leadership.

Team leadership

• Lead a distributed team of engineers, AI developers and support specialists across time zones, setting a high bar for engineering quality and ownership.

• Coach and grow the team, building AI capability across it and creating clear career paths.

The Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• 14-18 years in technology, with 6+ years leading engineering, architecture or solution delivery teams.

• A software engineering, solution architecture or data engineering background, with hands-on experience designing and delivering production systems. 

• Product mindset

• Demonstrable, practical AI fluency: has designed, built or led delivery of GenAI or agentic solutions in production (LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, prompt and evaluation design, document intelligence) and understands their cost, accuracy and risk trade-offs.

• Strong Microsoft Azure experience across cloud architecture, identity and security, DevOps and CI/CD.

• A track record of standing up a new team, function or capability and running it in steady state.

• Experience working with senior, non-technical business stakeholders and turning loosely defined needs into delivered outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Financial services, insurance, actuarial, benefits or professional services experience; familiarity with research, survey or benefits data is a strong advantage.

• Experience with Microsoft Foundry, Agent Framework, Copilot Studio, Power Platform and Dataverse, or agentic platforms such as Lyzr.

• Data platform experience (Databricks, Azure Data Factory, SQL) and a feel for data quality at scale.

• Working knowledge of Responsible AI frameworks, secure SDLC and regulated-data environments.

• Azure, AI/ML or architecture certifications.

• Experience leading distributed global teams and vendor-delivered work.

Key Skills & Competencies

• Technical: solution architecture, software engineering, Microsoft Azure, GenAI and agentic AI (LLMs, RAG, agents, evaluation), document intelligence and data extraction, data engineering, Power Platform and Dataverse, DevOps and CI/CD, secure SDLC, cloud cost management.

• Leadership: building a team from a standing start, sound technical judgement under ambiguity, influence across business and technology, prioritisation against value, clear executive communication, personal ownership.

• Hybrid working model.

• Work with global teams across multiple time zones and the HWC lines of business, with regular overlap with US and European business hours.

WTW is an Equal Opportunity Employer