Director Cloud Platform

Position Summary

Guidewire Software develops essential software solutions trusted by Property and Casualty insurance providers to support their clients in times of crisis such as natural disasters, accidents, and cyber threats. Their comprehensive applications empower insurers to manage policy sales, underwriting, claims settlement, and billing, alongside innovative tools for data management, digital portals, and predictive analytics. Globally, hundreds of insurers rely on Guidewire's Cloud Platform to process significant business volumes, reflecting Guidewire's commitment to enabling insurers to assist customers effectively.

Role Overview

The Director of Cloud Platform for the EMEA region will lead the Cloud Platform team, acting as the principal reliability liaison to regional clients. This multifaceted leadership role encompasses leading a high-performing engineering unit, collaborating with customers on platform functionality and enhancements, and representing Guidewire in executive interactions with insurer leadership. A key focus is to promote and embody Guidewire's operational philosophy while driving platform evolution towards software-driven solutions for complex infrastructure and reliability challenges.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary Cloud Platform liaison for EMEA customers and internal teams, fostering executive relationships with senior insurer and engineering leaders.
• Lead customer-facing technical discussions, presenting performance metrics, roadmap updates, and platform operational status.
• Organize and contribute to Customer Advisory Boards and reliability councils, incorporating structured customer feedback into platform development priorities.
• Conduct on-site visits and joint reliability assessments with customers, collaborating on risk evaluation and improvement strategies.
• Handle strategic reliability escalations, translating technical challenges into executive insights and ensuring responsive engineering action.
• Promote and implement operational best practices such as observability, reliability engineering, and Production Readiness Reviews.
• Collaborate with executive and product leaders to define long-term platform reliability and scalability roadmaps.
• Drive automation initiatives to reduce manual effort and enhance operational efficiency within engineering teams.
• Represent Guidewire’s technological leadership at executive meetings and external forums.
• Lead and mentor the Cloud Platform team in EMEA, cultivating ownership, customer focus, and continuous improvement.
• Manage team performance, coaching, career development, budgeting, resource distribution, and scheduling to fulfill company objectives effectively.

Candidate Profile

• Strong adherence to core platform operational principles and a clear understanding of proactive reliability engineering versus reactive operations support.
• Proven executive presence with ability to build trust among senior customer leaders such as CIOs and CTOs.
• Experience leading structured customer engagement programs, including advisory boards and reliability reviews, with readiness to travel within EMEA.
• Significant senior leadership experience in cloud platform or software engineering management, with a history of team growth and development.
• Strategic thinker skilled in communicating technical visions and navigating complex trade-offs for internal and customer audiences.
• Excellent problem-solving aptitude for distributed systems, anticipating issues and guiding teams to innovative resolutions.
• Strong communication and negotiation skills to align diverse stakeholder interests and influence product direction.
• Typically requires 15+ years' relevant experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 12+ years with a Master's; or 8+ years with a PhD; or equivalent professional experience.

Essential Skills

• Experience in establishing and scaling platform operational frameworks, including SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, and blameless postmortems, with the ability to communicate to technical and non-technical executives.
• Knowledge of DORA and GDPR compliance standards.
• Expertise in building and maintaining scalable, reliable infrastructure on AWS and Kubernetes platforms.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and GitOps methodologies.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and system architecture experience in Go, Python, or Java.
• Familiarity with observability and Application Performance Monitoring tools, ideally Datadog.
• Experience managing CI/CD pipelines and strategies through Jenkins, TeamCity, or GitHub Actions.
• Competence in people management systems such as Workday, and workstream tools including JIRA Service Management and product ideation platforms like AHA.
• Understanding of cloud networking, security, RBAC, and vulnerability management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications in AWS or Kubernetes (e.g., CKA, CKAD).
• Exposure to Guidewire's InsuranceSuite products or Cloud Platform.
• Previous experience in customer-facing engineering roles such as Customer Reliability Engineering or Customer Engineering within SaaS environments.
• Interest or background in emerging technologies including agentic AI and large language models development.

Additional Information

This senior leadership role demands availability beyond normal office hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays, to meet executive and customer engagement needs. Candidates should be prepared to accept this responsibility. Guidewire emphasizes inclusivity and equal opportunity employment, welcoming candidates from diverse backgrounds with commitment to non-discrimination. Employment offers are contingent on successful background and criminal history checks where applicable.

About Guidewire

Guidewire stands as a trusted platform provider for Property and Casualty insurers, empowering innovation, engagement, and growth. Operating in over 40 countries with more than 540 insurers utilizing Guidewire, the company manages extensive successful implementations supported by a vast R&D and partner ecosystem. Guidewire's Marketplace offers numerous applications to accelerate integration and innovation, reinforcing its market leadership.