About the role
Guidewire's Product Development and Operations (PDO) team is hiring a dynamic leader to run cloud-native, big-data services that power the Guidewire Data Platform (GDP). You'll build high-performing teams, drive product outcomes, and champion a customer-first mindset across engineering and cross-functional partners.
Responsibilities:
- Lead and grow multiple pods that architect and deliver cloud-native Data Platform services on AWS and Kubernetes, using modern data streaming stacks and a Data Mesh architecture.
- Drive the design and delivery of Gen AI solutions, including MCP servers and agentic services, and build AI-native proficiency across your teams.
- Identify and enable data monetisation opportunities, turning platform capabilities into customer-facing, revenue-generating products.
- Partner with product management and engineering leadership to set and deliver quarterly and annual goals, framing problems and defining success metrics.
- Orchestrate cross-functional collaboration across PM, Architecture, SRE/SecOps, Support, and Field Engineering to land features on time and with quality.
- Lead through ambiguity with iterative development: lean discovery, rapid prototyping, A/B and canary rollouts, and telemetry-driven iteration, pivoting quickly on customer feedback.
- Run a rigorous performance management cadence: goals, 1:1s, growth plans, competency rubrics, feedback loops, and fair evaluations.
- Champion engineering best practices: API-first design, SDD, IaC/MLOps, observability, chaos/resilience testing, and data governance.
- Manage execution risk: roadmap and quarterly planning, dependency management, incident postmortems, and proactive risk mitigation.
- Serve as an external evangelist: speak at conferences, panels, and meetups; publish blogs and whitepapers; and partner with Marketing/Comms to strengthen the Guidewire brand.
Requirements:
- 16+ years in software engineering with 4+ years managing managers or multi-pod teams building cloud/data platforms.
- Proven delivery of enterprise-scale, cloud-native data platform services at scale (throughput, latency, cost), with a track record of production ownership.
- Hands-on experience building and operating SaaS products, and delivering Gen AI solutions in production (e. g., LLM-based features, MCP servers, RAG, or agentic workflows).
- Experience with data monetizationpackaging data and platform capabilities into products that drive measurable business value.
- Strength in product thinking: framing problems, defining success metrics, and shipping iteratively toward outcomes.
- Excellent cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management, with clear written and verbal communication.
- A people leader who coaches for impact, sets high standards, and gives actionable feedback.
- Nice to have: Insurance domain, Analytics/ML pipelines, and data privacy/compliance experience.