Director of Programme Delivery, Governance & Operations in London

We are looking for a Director of Programme Delivery, Governance & Operations to help drive Wrisk's strategic roadmap while also supporting the smooth running of day-to-day business operations. This is not a narrow programme management or reporting role. We are looking for a strong, mature operator who can bring structure, pace, and ownership across both planned delivery and BAU activity. The right person will be able to move comfortably between roadmap execution, operational firefighting, governance discipline, stakeholder management, delivery tooling, and data‑led performance tracking.

You will help ensure Wrisk's major initiatives are delivered with clarity and control, while also supporting the business when urgent issues, operational blockers, partner escalations, or cross‑functional challenges arise. This means being close enough to the detail to understand what is really happening, confident enough to challenge weak assumptions, and calm enough to bring order when things become messy.

The ideal candidate will be highly data‑driven, quantitatively minded, comfortable with tools such as JIRA and Confluence, and able to create a clear operating rhythm across teams. They should not simply report on progress. They should actively drive progress, expose risks early, unblock issues, and hold teams accountable for outcomes.

We need someone who can own the room: mature, calm, credible, direct, and composed under pressure. This person should combine strong delivery governance with practical operational judgement, ensuring both strategic programmes and BAU priorities move forward with pace and discipline.

What You'll Do

• Own Roadmap Delivery and Execution: Lead the delivery governance of Wrisk's strategic roadmap, ensuring initiatives are clearly defined, properly prioritised, adequately resourced, and delivered against agreed timelines. Work with Product, Engineering, Data, Operations, Commercial, Compliance, and Executive teams to translate strategic priorities into executable plans with clear ownership, dependencies, milestones, risks, and outcomes. Ensure roadmap commitments are not just tracked, but actively driven.
• Support BAU Operations and Operational Control: Support the smooth running of day‑to‑day business operations by helping teams manage priorities, unblock issues, and resolve operational challenges. Act as a senior operational problem solver when BAU issues arise, particularly where there is cross‑functional complexity, partner impact, unclear ownership, or time pressure. Bring structure to operational firefighting by clarifying the issue, identifying accountable owners, setting actions, tracking resolution, and ensuring lessons are fed back into process improvement.
• Drive Governance With Pace and Discipline: Design, implement, and continuously improve programme and operational governance frameworks across Wrisk. Create clear mechanisms for prioritisation, delivery tracking, issue management, risk management, escalation, decision making, and executive visibility. Ensure governance creates clarity and momentum rather than bureaucracy.
• Use Data to Drive Delivery and Operational Performance: Build a data‑led view of roadmap delivery, BAU performance, team capacity, ticket progression, delivery bottlenecks, incident patterns, escalation trends, sprint performance, dependency risks, and initiative status. Use tools such as JIRA, Confluence, dashboards, workflow reporting, and other delivery management platforms to provide a clear and objective view of progress and operational health. Move the organisation away from anecdotal updates and towards measurable delivery and operational insight.
• Own JIRA and Delivery Tooling Discipline: Ensure delivery and operational tools are being used properly and consistently across teams. Improve the quality of ticket writing, estimation, dependency mapping, sprint planning, backlog management, issue tracking, status updates, and delivery reporting. Challenge weak data, unclear ownership, poor ticket hygiene, vague timelines, unsupported delivery assumptions, and unresolved blockers.
• Improve Operating Rhythm and Process Discipline: Continuously improve the way Wrisk plans, prioritises, delivers, escalates, and resolves issues. Identify recurring operational friction, weak handoffs, unclear ownership, poor prioritisation, and process gaps. Turn repeated firefighting into better operating models, clearer processes, and stronger governance.
• Support Audits, Certifications, and Operational Readiness: Support key audits, certifications, and operational readiness activities, ensuring documentation, evidence, processes, controls, and ownership are well managed. Work with relevant teams to ensure Wrisk remains prepared for external assessments, partner reviews, and internal governance requirements.
• Provide Clear, Data‑Driven Reporting to Stakeholders: Own the quality, accuracy, and consistency of delivery and operational reporting across the business. Ensure stakeholders receive clear, data‑driven updates that show what is on track, what is delayed, what is blocked, what decisions are needed, and what actions are being taken. Create clean delivery plans, status reports, dashboards, RAID logs, dependency trackers, and executive updates that are based on evidence rather than anecdotal commentary. Ensure risks, delays, resourcing gaps, partner dependencies, and delivery issues are surfaced early and transparently, rather than hidden or softened until they become bigger problems. Bring discipline to how teams communicate progress, ensuring updates are concise, honest, specific, and linked to measurable outcomes. The role should make it difficult for issues to sit under the carpet. Stakeholders should have a clear view of reality, supported by clean data, practical recommendations, and clear next steps.

Requirements

• At least 10 years' experience across programme delivery, business operations, delivery governance, operational management, or transformation in a fast‑paced technology, fintech, insurtech, insurance, or platform business.
• A strong track record of driving complex cross‑functional initiatives from planning through to execution.
• Experience supporting BAU operations, operational issue management, escalations, incident resolution, or business‑critical firefighting.
• Strong ownership mindset, with the ability to take ambiguous problems, create structure, and drive them to resolution.
• A data‑driven and quantitative approach to delivery and operations, with the ability to use metrics, dashboards, workflow data, and operational insight to guide decisions.
• Strong working knowledge of JIRA, Confluence, delivery dashboards, workflow management, ticketing processes, and delivery governance tools.
• Ability to challenge teams constructively on timelines, delivery assumptions, capacity, ticket quality, prioritisation, and ownership.
• Experience working with senior stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Data, Operations, Commercial, and Executive teams.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex issues clearly and drive alignment across technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Calmness and maturity under pressure, with the ability to own the room during escalations, partner discussions, and high‑pressure delivery moments.
• Strong problem‑solving skills, with the ability to move quickly from issue identification to practical action.
• Experience working with external partners, ideally including insurers, Auto OEMs, technology providers, or regulated financial services partners.
• Familiarity with audits, certifications, operational controls, or regulated environment requirements would be valuable.
• A bias for action, high personal ownership, and the ability to operate effectively in a growing business where structure needs to be built while the business continues to move.