Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Cloud/ Kubernetes Platform

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 Cloud Platform provides the foundational capabilities, infrastructure, and engineering services that enable teams to build, deploy, and operate modern cloud-based products at scale. We focus on secure, resilient, and scalable platform capabilities that improve developer productivity, enable self-service engineering, and accelerate innovation across Guidewire Cloud.
As a Senior Manager, Software Engineering – Cloud Platform, you will lead and develop high-performing Cloud Platform Engineering teams, combining strong technical leadership with effective people management. You will remain closely engaged in technical design, engineering execution, and problem-solving while providing direction, coaching, and career development for your engineers. Working closely with Staff and Principal Engineers, Product Management, and other engineering leaders, you will shape platform architecture and technical strategy, guide complex engineering decisions, and drive the evolution of reliable, scalable, and secure cloud platform capabilities. Your leadership will be critical to improving platform reliability, developer experience, and engineering effectiveness across Guidewire Cloud.

Job Description

What you'll do

• Lead and develop Cloud Platform Engineering teams: Provide technical direction, coaching, and career development while building a culture of engineering excellence, ownership, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Build and develop engineering talent: Establish clear expectations, provide regular feedback, manage performance, and develop engineers' technical and leadership capabilities. Foster an inclusive environment that encourages independent thinking, collaboration, and accountability for engineering outcomes.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership: Work closely with engineers on complex technical problems, architectural decisions, design reviews, and implementation trade-offs. Help resolve technical roadblocks, challenge proposed solutions, and guide teams toward scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable designs. Remain technically engaged without becoming a bottleneck for implementation.
• Own engineering execution and outcomes: Drive end-to-end delivery from planning and prioritization through implementation, rollout, and continuous improvement. Stay close to technical execution, identify engineering risks early, help resolve critical blockers, and ensure delivery decisions support quality and long-term platform health.
• Champion engineering excellence: Drive adoption of API-first design, TDD, BDD, automated testing, GitOps, observability, secure coding, and continuous delivery. Champion the collaborative engineering practices we use,, such as pair programming and spec-driven development, where requirements and design are written and reviewed before implementation begins, as the default way the team builds software, and help engineers who are new to them get comfortable. Provide practical technical guidance and promote engineering standards that improve code quality, maintainability, and delivery effectiveness.ance and promote engineering standards that improve code quality, maintainability, and delivery effectiveness.
• Shape platform strategy and architecture: Partner with Product Management, Security, Architects, and engineering leaders to evolve the Cloud Platform roadmap. Evaluate architectural options, prioritize technical investments, address technical debt, and balance near-term delivery with scalability, reliability, security, and long-term platform evolution.
• Drive reliability and operational excellence: Take accountability for platform reliability, availability, performance, security, and cost efficiency. Use operational metrics and SLOs to identify systemic issues, guide root-cause analysis, resolve recurring problems, and drive sustainable improvements.
• Drive AI-enabled engineering and automation: Champion the responsible use of AI and automation across software development, testing, delivery, and platform operations. Identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity, reduce manual toil, accelerate delivery, and improve quality, using measurable outcomes to assess impact.
• Stay close to engineering: Maintain the technical depth to engage in code and design reviews, understand implementation details, evaluate technical trade-offs, and provide actionable guidance when teams encounter complex engineering challenges.
• Drive continuous platform improvement: Identify opportunities to simplify architecture, modernize platform capabilities, reduce recurring engineering friction, improve developer experience, and balance immediate delivery needs with sustainable long-term improvements.

What you'll bring

• • Demonstrated ability to apply AI and automation to software engineering and platform operations, with a focus on practical adoption, measurable productivity improvements, and improved engineering outcomes.
  • 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong background in building, designing, and evolving SaaS products, cloud platforms, or platform engineering capabilities in a product-focused organization.
  • Significant experience leading software engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development. Demonstrated prior experience managing a team of approximately 15 or more engineers, with the ability to balance people leadership with active technical engagement and accountability for engineering outcomes.
  • Proven experience leading a Cloud Platform Engineering team or equivalent platform-focused engineering team, with accountability for technical direction, architecture, engineering execution, reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
  • Strong hands-on software engineering background in Java, Go, or Python, with the ability to review code, evaluate implementation approaches, assess architectural designs, and guide engineers through complex technical challenges. Demonstrated technical depth that extends beyond earlier-career coding experience.
  • Deep understanding of cloud-native and distributed systems architectures, preferably on AWS, including multi-tenant design, scalability, high availability, resilience, security, and operational excellence.
  • Strong experience with cloud-native technologies and platform tooling, including Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tools, and modern CI/CD and Git-based deployment pipelines. Ability to guide technical decisions and help teams navigate implementation and operational challenges.
  • Strong system design and distributed systems fundamentals, supported by practical experience designing, debugging, and operating production systems. Ability to guide root-cause analysis and make architectural decisions that improve resilience, observability, performance, and cost efficiency.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence through technical judgment, engineering credibility, and effective collaboration with engineers, technical leaders, cross-functional peers, and senior stakeholders.
  • A calm, pragmatic, outcome-oriented leadership style under pressure, with sound technical judgment, a strong bias for action, and the ability to resolve complex problems while balancing immediate needs with long-term engineering improvements.

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.

Guidewire is proud to be a disability inclusive employer. We are committed to providing individualized accommodations and support to candidates for any part of our hiring process. If you think you may need disability-related accommodations, please email EmployAbility at [email protected], our disability partner, or schedule a call with an EmployAbility expert (calendar booking slot) for a confidential conversation.