Senior Commercial Underwriter, Underwriting Intelligence

About the role

This role is for a senior commercial underwriter who sees risk as a system rather than a series of isolated decisions. You will own the transformation of raw underwriting judgment into structured, repeatable intelligence that an AI can execute at scale. In this position, you will define how risk is evaluated, how submissions are built, and how markets interpret our appetite and routing logic. You will not simply accept or decline risks; you will interrogate the underlying assumptions and reshape how information flows through the entire underwriting pipeline. This is a chance to turn the most human parts of insurance into scalable infrastructure that compounds over time. You will work closely with product, engineering, and market-facing teams to ensure every submission reflects the highest standards of clarity and completeness.

Key facts

What you'll do

Review live submissions and system outputs to identify missing context, weak risk summaries, flawed assumptions, and gaps in exposure analysis.

Partner directly with engineering and product teams to convert underwriting judgment into concrete workflows, checklists, appetite rules, routing logic, escalation triggers, QA processes, and system instructions.

Define what a market-ready submission looks like across diverse commercial lines and specialty risks, ensuring consistency and completeness.

Build and refine appetite and routing logic for carriers, wholesalers, MGAs, and specialty markets, determining what we write, where it goes, and why.

Act as a cross-functional advisor to intake, sales, placements, engineering, and leadership, clarifying what is placeable, what is missing, how to frame risk, and where workflows fail.

Create playbooks for recurring risk categories that capture real-world underwriting knowledge and make it reusable across the team.

Think simultaneously like an underwriter and a broker, balancing technical risk assessment with market positioning and next-step strategy.

Own the definition of submission quality and ensure that every interaction with carriers reflects clear, actionable, and structured intelligence.

Identify patterns in rejected or amended submissions and translate those insights into system improvements and process guardrails.

Champion continuous improvement by measuring submission health, underwriting outcomes, and system performance to refine rules over time.

Collaborate with data and analytics to validate that encoded rules align with real-world results and evolving market expectations.

Ensure that product decisions are informed by practical underwriting realities and that engineering teams understand the consequences of design choices.

Lead by example in demonstrating how deep expertise in commercial lines and E&S risks can be systematized without losing nuance.

Requirements

Bring 4+ years of commercial underwriting experience with meaningful exposure to specialty commercial and/or E&S markets.

Have worked at an MGA, MGU, wholesaler, wholesale carrier, program administrator, specialty underwriting platform, or similar environment where messy risks and imperfect submissions are common.

Demonstrate breadth across multiple commercial lines or risk categories such as general liability, products liability, workers' comp, professional liability, tech E&O, cyber, commercial property, garage/garagekeepers, commercial auto, excess/umbrella, contractors, habitational, restaurants, staffing, security, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, auto services, or other specialty classes.

Be tech-savvy and product-curious, comfortable sitting with engineers, pressure-testing system outputs, explaining underwriting logic, and helping to build workflows that make the organization smarter.

Communicate underwriting concepts clearly to engineers, salespeople, intake operators, brokers, and founders without relying on opaque jargon.

Move efficiently in fast-paced, ambiguous environments, switching contexts easily while maintaining high standards of accuracy and judgment.

Want your expertise to scale beyond one-off decisions so that thousands of submissions can benefit from a single refined perspective.

Prefer environments where underwriting is treated as infrastructure rather than a static gatekeeping function.

Value collaboration across teams and a mindset of continuous learning from both successes and failures.

Nice to have

Experience working with MGAs, wholesalers, and specialty markets that rely on ACORDs, supplements, portals, and fragmented data sources.

Familiarity with how underwriting logic is encoded in rules engines, workflow systems, or low-code platforms.

Understanding of how carriers, reinsurers, and advisory bodies influence appetite and placement strategies.

Background in building or influencing QA processes for underwriting quality and submission completeness.

Experience explaining technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders in a way that supports informed decision-making.

Practical notes

This role is based in San Francisco and requires in-person presence on-site. Long days are expected during periods of high growth, and the pace will match Harper's rapid scale. There is no specified visa sponsorship, and the role is full-time.