IT AmTrust Financial Services, Inc.

Voytek Janisz, Senior Vice President, IT AmTrust Financial Services

The Constant Balancing Act of it Leadership

Voytek Janisz

Insurance Systems Architect

Voytek Janisz is Senior Vice President of IT at AmTrust Financial Services, leading enterprise technology strategy, agile execution and large-scale global technology organizations.

Lessons from Leading Large-Scale Technology Teams

Years in enterprise IT teach you things no certification ever will. The clearest lesson is that technology problems are almost always people problems. A failed ERP rollout, a missed delivery, a team that keeps producing the same bugs, dig far enough, and you’ll usually find a misalignment between people, not systems. That realization shapes every decision I make as a leader.

Managing global teams across time zones and cultures also forces you to get comfortable with ambiguity. You can’t control everything from one seat. What you can do is build teams that are capable, aligned and trusted to make good decisions without you. That’s the actual job, not solving problems, but building the environment where your people can solve them.

Managing the Tension between Innovation and Stability

The hardest tension in IT leadership is the one between innovation and stability. Every financial institution faces it. The business wants speed; regulators want predictability; your engineers want to work on interesting problems; and your operations team just wants nothing to break at 2 am. I’ve learned that you don’t resolve this tension; you manage it continuously. You run structured pilots before any broad rollout, maintain clear rollback protocols and you don’t promote the word “transformation” without a solid operational baseline behind it. Innovation without stability isn’t a feature. It’s a risk you’re hiding.

The Pressures Reshaping Insurance Technology

The financial services and insurance technology space is under more pressure right now than at any point in the past decade. AI and automation are moving faster than most compliance frameworks can keep up with. Cyber threats are more sophisticated. Technical debt in legacy systems, some of them decades old, is becoming an active liability rather than a background concern. The leaders adapting well share one trait—they’ve stopped treating technology as a cost center and started treating it as a strategic capability. That shift changes how you hire, how you fund projects and how you have conversations at the board level.

Building Learning into the Operating Model

On continuous learning—I don’t believe in mandatory training catalogs and hoping something sticks. What actually works is creating the conditions where learning is necessary. You rotate people across functions deliberately. You do structured post-mortems after failures, without blame, with the explicit goal of extracting something useful. You bring engineers into vendor evaluations and architecture conversations earlier than is comfortable. When people are exposed to problems slightly outside their current scope, they grow. That’s not a program. It’s a design choice.

Leadership Advice for the Next Generation of IT Professionals

For anyone early in their career looking at a leadership track, get close to the business, not just the technology. Understand what a profit margin actually means to the organization you work for. Learn to communicate upward—clearly, concisely, without jargon—before you think you need to. And be willing to do the unglamorous work. Strategy gets talked about constantly; execution is what separates the people who rise from the ones who plateau. Nobody hands you a global team because you had good ideas. They hand it to you because you delivered, repeatedly, under pressure.