Summary

Guidewire provides outstanding software for the second-largest financial services industry in the world: insurance. We deliver the core applications that Property and Casualty (P/C) insurers use to build their products, sell policies, settle claims, and bill their customers. Through Guidewire Cloud, our SaaS platform, we enable customers to rapidly innovate, scale securely, and drive measurable value. Our Application Platform and underlying cloud infrastructure help internal teams and customers build modern insurance applications, boosting developer productivity, enabling a rich partner ecosystem, and leveraging the latest cloud technologies.

As a Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Platform, you will be a key leader within the Application Platform organization, accountable for building and leading a high-performing Platform Engineering POD. You will focus on people leadership and organizational excellence while guiding technical direction across SaaS and platform services. Partnering closely with senior engineers and product leaders, you will drive delivery of resilient, scalable cloud platform capabilities (preferably on AWS) that underpin a complex suite of products generating over $1B in annual revenue and serving 400+ enterprises worldwide. Your leadership will be critical to ensuring our platform is reliable, secure, and a great experience for both developers and customers.

Job Description

What you’ll do

Lead and grow a Platform Engineering POD, providing clear direction, coaching, and career development for a team of engineers.

Set expectations, give regular feedback, and manage performance to build a high-performing, inclusive, and accountable team.

Partner with Staff/Principal Engineers to guide technical and architectural decisions for platform services, focusing on scalability, reliability, and security rather than day-to-day coding.

Own end-to-end delivery for the Platform POD – from planning and prioritization through execution, rollout, and ongoing improvement.

Drive adoption of engineering best practices (API-first design, TDD, GitOps, observability) across your POD.

Collaborate closely with Product Management, Security, and other engineering leaders to align platform roadmaps with business and customer needs.

Proactively identify risks, remove blockers, and ensure your POD consistently meets agreed SLAs/SLOs and quality standards.

Role-model Guidewire’s culture of curiosity, continuous improvement, and responsible use of AI, encouraging your team to leverage AI and automation to improve productivity and outcomes.

What you’ll bring

Demonstrated ability to embrace AI and apply it to your role, using data-driven insights to drive innovation, productivity, and continuous improvement.

15+ years of software development experience, with a strong background in building SaaS and/or PaaS products at a product company.

Significant experience in people management (typically 6–8+ years), including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development of software engineers.

Proven experience leading an entire Platform Engineering POD or equivalent cross-functional platform team, accountable for reliability, scalability, and developer experience.

Earlier-career hands-on programming experience in Java, Go, or Python, and still comfortable reviewing code, discussing design trade-offs, and challenging technical proposals.

Deep understanding of SaaS architectures on public cloud (preferably AWS), including multi-tenant, highly available, and secure systems.

Strong experience with CI/CD and platform tooling, such as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, OpenShift, and modern Git-based pipelines.

Solid understanding of system design and distributed systems, including resilience, observability, and cost-efficiency considerations.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence and build trust with engineers, peers, and senior stakeholders.

A calm, pragmatic leadership style under pressure, with a strong bias for action and continuous improvement.

About Guidewire

Guidewire is the platform P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. We combine digital, core, analytics, and AI to deliver our platform as a cloud service. More than 540+ insurers in 40 countries, from new ventures to the largest and most complex in the world, run on Guidewire.

As a partner to our customers, we continually evolve to enable their success. We are proud of our unparalleled implementation track record with 1600+ successful projects, supported by the largest R&D team and partner ecosystem in the industry. Our Marketplace provides hundreds of applications that accelerate integration, localization, and innovation.

For more information, please visit www.guidewire.com and follow us on Twitter: @Guidewire_PandC.

Guidewire Software, Inc. is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We are committed to an inclusive workplace, and believe that a diversity of perspectives, abilities, and cultures is a key to our success. Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship, marital status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or disability. All offers are contingent upon passing a criminal history and other background checks where it's applicable to the position.