Director Cloud Platform

About Guidewire Software

Guidewire delivers essential software for Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance companies, enabling them to protect customers during crises including natural disasters, accidents, and cyber threats. Their core applications help insurers with policy selling, underwriting, claims settlement, and billing. The company also provides innovative products in data management, digital portals, and predictive analytics, running on the advanced Guidewire Cloud Platform trusted globally by hundreds of insurers.

Role Overview

The Director of Cloud Platform will lead the Guidewire Cloud Platform engineering team across EMEA, acting as the principal reliability liaison to customers and representing the platform to their senior leadership. This leadership role balances managing a high-performing engineering organization, engaging directly with customers to understand needs and improve platform reliability, and shaping strategic platform roadmaps while deepening customer trust.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior Cloud Platform contact for EMEA customers and internal stakeholders, cultivating strong executive relationships.
• Lead technical platform discussions with customers, communicating performance trends, roadmap updates, and platform state.
• Facilitate regional Customer Advisory Boards and reliability councils to incorporate structured customer feedback into platform development.
• Conduct on-site visits and collaborative reliability reviews with customer engineering teams to identify risks and agree on enhancement plans.
• Act as escalation point for critical reliability issues, translating technical challenges into clear executive communications and driving engineering responses.
• Implement and champion platform operational best practices including observability, reliability engineering, and production readiness.
• Collaborate with executive and product leadership to define long-term reliability and scalability roadmaps.
• Promote automation initiatives that reduce manual workload and enable engineering focus on business outcomes.
• Represent Guidewire’s technical direction at executive meetings and external industry events.
• Lead, mentor, and inspire the EMEA Cloud Platform team fostering ownership, customer focus, and continual improvement.
• Oversee team performance management, coaching, career growth, budgeting, and resource planning.

Candidate Profile

• Strong commitment to platform operational excellence with a clear understanding of proactive reliability engineering over reactive support.
• Demonstrated executive presence and experience building trust with senior enterprise customer stakeholders.
• Experienced in managing structured customer engagement programs including executive briefings and advisory boards.
• Proven leadership in Cloud Platform Engineering or related software engineering domains, with a record of scaling teams and managing managers.
• Exceptional people management skills with the ability to build and empower distributed, high-performing teams.
• Strategic thinker capable of articulating long-term technical vision and balancing complex trade-offs for varied audiences.
• Strong problem-solving skills to analyze distributed systems and guide innovative technology solutions.
• Excellent communication and negotiation abilities to manage multiple stakeholder interests and influence product strategy.
• Typically requires 15+ years of relevant experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 12+ years with a Master's; or PhD with 8+ years; or equivalent experience.

Required Technical Skills

• Demonstrated success implementing platform operational frameworks such as SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, and blameless postmortems at scale.
• Knowledge of compliance requirements including DORA and GDPR.
• Expertise in building and managing scalable, reliable infrastructure in AWS and Kubernetes ecosystems.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform and GitOps practices.
• Strong software engineering background with architectural insight into systems developed in Go, Python, or Java.
• Experience with observability and APM tools, especially Datadog (monitoring, dashboards, synthetics).
• Overseeing CI/CD pipelines and strategies using Jenkins, TeamCity, or GitHub Actions.
• People management experience using Workday and familiarity with tools like JIRA Service Management and AHA.
• Solid understanding of cloud networking, security, role-based access controls, and vulnerability management.

Preferred Skills and Interests

• Certifications in AWS and/or Kubernetes such as CKA or CKAD.
• Familiarity with Guidewire InsuranceSuite products or the Guidewire Cloud Platform.
• Prior experience in customer-facing engineering roles such as Customer Reliability Engineering or equivalent in enterprise SaaS environments.
• Interest or experience with emerging technologies including agentic AI and large language models (LLMs).

Additional Information

This senior leadership position is not part of an on-call rota but requires availability outside of regular business hours for executive escalations and customer engagements, including evenings, weekends, and holidays as business needs dictate.

Guidewire is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion, ensuring fair consideration for qualified applicants regardless of background.