Director, Catastrophe Risk Modeling

As a team member in Finance at Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company with nearly $70 billion in annual sales, the opportunities are endless! Let Nationwide help create your career journey! At Nationwide®, “on your side” goes beyond just words. Our customers are at the center of everything we do and we’re looking for associates who are passionate about delivering extraordinary care.

Overview:

Nationwide’s Enterprise Catastrophe Risk Management team is responsible for quantifying and managing the company’s exposure to natural catastrophe and severe weather events across the enterprise. The Director, Catastrophe Risk Modeling will manage a team, responsible for modeling physical assets and property exposures insured by Nationwide, running them through leading third-party catastrophe models and internal tools to estimate the probability and financial impact of hurricanes, convective storms, wildfires, and other perils on an annual basis.

Operating as a shared service under Enterprise Risk Modeling & Capital Management, the department supports a broad set of stakeholders, including P&C business units, reinsurance and alternative risk teams, actuarial and finance.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead a high-performing catastrophe analytics team focused on probability modeling and research, overseeing day-to-day execution of enterprise cat models, workflows, and deliverables while developing and mentoring a team of modelers and analysts.
• Own the end-to-end production and enhancement of catastrophe models, including running RMS/Verisk platforms and related severe event modeling tools, managing model upgrades, and ensuring that outputs are accurate, reproducible, and aligned with enterprise standards.
• Translate complex model results into clear, actionable insights for senior leaders in P&C, Reinsurance, and Enterprise Risk—supporting decisions on risk appetite, capital, reinsurance strategy, and treaty structures.
• Drive innovation in catastrophe risk analytics by incorporating new data sources, advanced statistical and machine learning techniques, and scenario analyses to improve how Nationwide understands and prices catastrophe risk.
• Foster a strong, trust-based team culture and effective change management, empowering team members to run with their work, escalating appropriately, and continuing the positive, stable culture that exists today.

Qualifications

• Education & Credentials
  • Bachelor’s degree in actuarial science, mathematics, statistics, engineering, or a related quantitative field required.
  • ACAS or FCAS designation strongly preferred; candidates with equivalent quantitative credentials and deep catastrophe risk experience will be considered.
• Technical Expertise
  • Significant experience in catastrophe risk modeling for P&C insurance (e.g., RMS, Verisk/AIR, or similar platforms); severe event modeling certifications (e.g., SEEM) or equivalent experience are a plus.
  • Strong hands-on skills with SQL and advanced Excel, with the ability to manage and interrogate large, complex datasets and model outputs; experience with R and/or Python for statistical modeling and automation preferred.
• Leadership & Team Management
  • Proven experience leading analytics, actuarial, or modeling teams, ideally 5+ associates, including responsibility for performance, coaching, and career development.
  • Demonstrated success building, transforming, or stabilizing teams—promoting a healthy, collaborative culture and enabling strong performers to do their best work without heavy-handed performance management.
• Business & Collaboration Skills
  • Deep understanding of P&C insurance and reinsurance, especially property lines and catastrophe-exposed portfolios, with the ability to connect model outputs to underwriting, portfolio management, and capital decisions.
  • Excellent communication and storytelling skills, able to explain complex modeling concepts and uncertainty to non-technical stakeholders, influence decisions, and represent catastrophe risk in cross-functional forums.

This role does not qualify for employer sponsored work authorization. Nationwide does not participate in the STEM OPT extension program.  

It is our intention to fill this role in Columbus, OH. However, applications from candidates working remotely who bring critical industry skills and relevant experience may be considered. 

Internal Compensation Grade: H5

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Job Description Summary

Do you have the desire to analyze data and perform groundbreaking research to drive business outcomes? Nationwide has been using data to serve our members for almost 100 years. Our industry-leading workforce adopts an agile work environment and a collaborative culture to deliver outstanding solutions and results. Our Risk Analytics Researchers play a key role in harnessing the power of data to deliver business results. Specifically, they are responsible for modeling sophisticated problems, discovering insights, and identifying business opportunities from data using a variety of techniques from mathematics, actuarial studies, statistics, data science and financial engineering.

As a Director, you’ll have an opportunity to lead people and projects associated with the design, development, and application of unique risk models. You’ll need an understanding of strategic business objectives and will work with your staff and business partners across the organization to develop solutions to pressing business needs. We’ll count on you to be a subject matter authority in Nationwide’s risks. It’s imperative that you are fully proficient with basic and sophisticated mathematical, statistical and analytical techniques associated with risk modeling.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities: 

• Leads the research and implementation of financial engineering, data science and statistical techniques for risk management and business applications. 

• Provides thought leadership to create and test risk limits to provide guidance on asset allocation, risk transfer, and product growth decisions.

• Leads complex quantitative modeling processes. Ensures models are functioning appropriately and align with industry standards. 

• Consults and collaborates across the organization to ensure model assumptions, processes, and outputs are well understood and that modeling standard methodologies are upheld. 

• Reviews and analyzes model output to identify model limitations and their impact. Mitigates model limitations with the adaptation of appropriate, corrective quantitative methods.

• Leads all aspects of model documentation for rationale, assumptions and a guide for business continuity purposes.

• Applies expertise to develop or provide input and direction to staff on creative solutions to business problems. 

• Acts as the technology owner for risk analytics. 

May perform other responsibilities as assigned. 

Reporting Relationships: Reports to Risk/Actuarial leader. Manages a team of four or more risk/advanced analytics or actuarial professionals. 

Typical Skills and Experiences:

Education: Undergraduate studies in finance, accounting, economics, statistics, mathematics or related subject area required. Graduate-level studies in a related field with advanced degree highly desirable. 

License/Certification/Designation: Progress toward FCAS, FSA, CQF, CFA or similar preferred.

Experience: Typically, seven or more years of related work experience in financial risk modeling or actuarial functions. 

Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Demonstrated people leadership capabilities. Strong understanding of machine learning, stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, sampling methods and other statistical techniques applicable to specialized risk modeling. Confirmed mathematical knowledge of specialized risk models such as those used in hedging, economic scenario generation, catastrophe, credit risk, etc. Advanced understanding of risk management operations such as asset-liability management, portfolio risk assessment, hedging, etc. Sophisticated written and verbal communication skills. Advanced proficiency with Excel and common statistical software such as R, SAS, Python or MATLAB. 

Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.

Staffing exceptions to the above must be approved by the hiring manager’s leader and Human Resources Business Partner.

Values: Regularly and consistently demonstrates Nationwide Values.

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