Director Cloud Platform
Description
Summary
POSITION OVERVIEW
At Guidewire, we deliver the software that Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance companies rely on to protect their customers during crises, natural disasters, accidents, and cyber risks. Our core applications enable insurers to sell and underwrite policies, settle claims, and bill their customers. We also offer a suite of innovative products for data management, digital portals, and predictive analytics.
Hundreds of insurers worldwide use Guidewire's products, running on our cutting-edge Guidewire Cloud Platform, to handle billions of dollars in business. We are dedicated to providing the tools and technology that help insurers protect and support their customers when they need it most.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are searching for a Director of Cloud Platform to lead our Cloud Platform organization in EMEA and serve as the senior reliability partner to our regional customers. This role sits on three co-equal pillars: leading a world-class engineering organization, working with customers on existing functionality as well as investigate potential improvements, and acting as the senior leadership face of Guidewire Cloud Platform to our insurer customers — engaging directly with their senior leadership to build trust, shape roadmaps, and ensure the platform consistently delivers on the commitments we make to them.
You will champion our philosophy, drawing from foundational principles, while translating that philosophy into the language and outcomes that matter most to our customers. You will drive the evolution of our platform toward a software-first approach to solving complex application, infrastructure, and reliability challenges — and you will represent that work credibly in front of the senior customer executives whose businesses depend on us.
Job Description
WHAT YOU’LL DO
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Customer Leadership:
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Serve as the senior Cloud Platform point of contact for EMEA customers and internal teams, building and sustaining executive relationships with insurer senior leadership, and engineering leaders across the region.
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Lead platform-focused technical discussions with customer leadership, presenting performance trends, roadmap commitments, and the operational posture of the Guidewire Cloud Platform.
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Chair or contribute to regional Customer Advisory Boards and reliability councils, gathering structured customer input and ensuring it shapes our Platform roadmap and investment priorities.
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Travel for on-site customer visits and joint reliability reviews, partnering with customer engineering and operations teams to assess shared risks, agree on improvement plans, and strengthen long-term confidence in the platform.
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Act as the customer-facing escalation point for strategic reliability concerns, translating technical realities into executive narratives and turning customer feedback into action inside the engineering organization.
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Technical and Engineering Leadership:
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Champion and implement Platform operational best practices, establishing and maturing core pillars including observability, reliability engineering, Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs).
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Partner with executive leadership and product engineering to define the long-term strategic roadmap for the reliability and scalability of the Guidewire Cloud Platform, articulating technological trade-offs and vision.
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Drive a culture of automation to eliminate toil, improve operational efficiency, and empower engineering teams to focus on delivering business value.
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Represent the technical direction of your initiatives in executive management meetings and at external technical conferences, demonstrating Guidewire's thought leadership.
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People Leadership:
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Lead, mentor, and inspire the EMEA Cloud Platform organization, fostering a culture of ownership, customer empathy, and continuous improvement across multiple teams and senior technical leaders.
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Develop and empower your team of engineers through effective performance management, coaching, and career development — raising the bar for talent across the region.
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Manage departmental budgets, resource allocation, and schedules to meet corporate and functional objectives, ensuring operational effectiveness.
WHO YOU ARE
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General Experience and Presence:
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A deep-seated belief in core Platform operational principles, with a clear understanding of the difference between reactive operations support and proactive reliability engineering.
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Demonstrated executive presence with enterprise customers, including a track record of building trust with senior customer stakeholders (CIO, CTO, VP-level) and representing engineering credibly in customer-facing forums.
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Direct experience running structured customer engagement programs — Executive Briefings, advisory boards, on-site reliability reviews, or equivalent — and willingness to travel within EMEA for these engagements.
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Extensive experience in a senior leadership role within Cloud Platform Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field, with a proven track record of managing managers and scaling teams.
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Demonstrated excellence in people management, with a track record of building, scaling, and empowering high-performing, geographically distributed teams.
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A strategic mindset with the ability to articulate a long-term technical vision to both executive and engineering audiences — internal and customer — effectively managing complex trade-offs.
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Exceptional problem-solving capabilities, with the ability to analyze complex distributed systems, anticipate potential problems, and guide teams to innovative solutions.
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Outstanding communication and negotiation skills, capable of reconciling multiple stakeholder views — including external customer leadership — to drive business results and influence product strategy.
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Typically requires a minimum of 15 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 12 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years experience; or equivalent work experience.
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Required Skills:
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Proven experience implementing and scaling Platform operational principles (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, blameless postmortems) across a large engineering organization, including communicating these concepts to non-technical executive audiences.
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Familiarity with DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance requirements.
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Deep expertise in building, deploying, and running scalable and reliable infrastructure within AWS and Kubernetes ecosystems.
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Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and GitOps principles.
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Strong software engineering foundation with architectural knowledge of systems built in Go, Python, or Java.
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Proven experience leveraging modern observability and APM tools, with a strong preference for Datadog (monitoring, dashboards, synthetics, etc).
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Experience overseeing CI/CD strategy and pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, TeamCity, or GitHub Actions.
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Experience with people management in Workday and managing workstreams using ticketing tools like JIRA Service Management and ideation tools like AHA.
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Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, role-based access control (RBAC), and vulnerability management.
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Preferred Skills:
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AWS and/or Kubernetes certifications (e.g., CKA, CKAD).
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Familiarity with Guidewire's product suite (InsuranceSuite) or the Guidewire Cloud Platform is a significant plus.
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Prior experience in a customer-facing engineering role — Customer Reliability Engineering, Customer Engineering, or equivalent — within an enterprise SaaS environment.
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Interest or experience in emerging technologies such as agentic AI/LLMs development
JOIN US
This is an opportunity to join a mission-driven company and make a real impact in the lives of people facing challenges. You'll work with cutting-edge technology, collaborate with talented peers, and grow your skills in a culture