Insurance is the family trade.

My grandfather spent his working life deciding which risks were worth taking; my father did the same, then carried that judgement into distribution. Nearly seven decades of insurance between them; I never knew my grandfather, but I grew up on my father's stories. In 2005, fresh out of a master's degree in computer science, I started in life insurance underwriting in Mumbai. Within that first year I'd designed and built, hands-on, the company's first straight-through processing for mortgage reducing term cover. It earned a recognition I'm still quietly proud of, and it gave me the question that has shaped my career since: what should a screen do for the person sitting in front of it?

Underwriting taught me how the business thinks. Technology, I realised quickly, was where most of what it needed went unmet. The people pricing and binding policies were working around their systems, not with them. Bringing the two together serves the customer better than either alone, and that has been my thread ever since.

Analytics in general insurance came next, and it gave me something underwriting couldn't: the whole company at once. Claims, pricing, distribution, finance, operations, and how a number in one department became a decision in another. That is still how I look at any carrier I walk into.

Along the way I worked offshore from Mumbai for a large US carrier as a commercial lines business analyst on a forms and rating programme for its proprietary policy administration system, then spent 2012 on an enterprise data warehouse programme for one of India's largest general insurers. In early 2013 I joined the rating team of a major carrier in Hartford, Connecticut, as a rating analyst, supporting the pricing and rating function, and later that year my family and I moved to the United States so I could continue that work on site. In 2014 I was maintaining a proprietary premium audit system for another major carrier's commercial lines. From 2015 onwards my work has been Guidewire PolicyCenter programmes on personal lines, across several of the biggest carriers in the country, with a brief stretch on Exigen during a policy conversion in 2016 and 2017, always on the functional side: translating what underwriters, agents and service teams actually do into what a system should let them do.

I have a master's degree in computer science, I wrote production code early in my career, and I still chose the functional side. For the past two years, as a functional consultant on the integration side of a Guidewire programme at a large carrier, I've learned that where systems meet is where users feel the difference. I can hand an engineering team a clear solution and a sensible high-level shape for it; they build it far better than I would.

During the tail end of the pandemic we created a family base in Southern California. It's a household that talks data at dinner: my wife is a Program Manager for Data Strategy and Analysis at one of the largest health insurance groups in the country, so between us we cover both halves of the insurance world, property and people. Our daughter, in high school, and our son, in middle school, are the sharpest minds in the house and already correct us both. Teddy and Pluto, Havanese brothers, and Coco, a goldendoodle who believes he runs the place, remain unimpressed by all of it. Happy family, happy professionals.

If any of this sounds familiar, I'd enjoy a conversation.