Lead, Site Reliability Engineer (Platform)

Summary

The Opportunity

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) brings together software and systems engineering to design and operate large-scale, highly distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, on the Platform team, you will play a key role in designing, building, and operating the foundational infrastructure that powers Guidewire's SaaS platform. You will focus on automation, reliability, scalability, and operability — ensuring our multi-tenant cloud platform consistently meets both functional and non-functional requirements. You will work closely with product development teams to influence system design, improve resilience, and ensure production readiness, while building the tools and frameworks that enable efficient, global, follow-the-sun operations.

Job Description

What You'll Do

Drive Reliability, Automation & Scale

• Design, build, and operate highly reliable, scalable infrastructure for a multi-tenant SaaS platform.

• Automate deployment, provisioning, and operational workflows across cloud infrastructure and applications.

• Develop internal tools, services, and frameworks to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.

• Participate in a follow-the-sun rotation to support critical production systems.

Improve Platform & Infrastructure

• Contribute to core platform systems by building features, resolving issues, and enhancing reliability.

• Partner with development teams to ensure systems meet availability, performance, and scalability requirements.

• Proactively identify risks, bottlenecks, and failure modes, and implement solutions before they impact customers.

Observability, Incident Management & Resilience

• Build and maintain observability systems (metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards).

• Define and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and reliability metrics.

• Lead or contribute to incident response, root cause analysis, and blameless postmortems.

• Drive improvements toward self-healing systems and reduced operational toil.

Security & Identity

• Design and support secure access patterns, including SSO, SAML, and OAuth-based authentication systems.

• Ensure platform services meet security and compliance standards.

Enablement & Collaboration

• Collaborate across engineering teams, providing guidance, feedback, and hands-on contributions.

• Create and maintain documentation, runbooks, and training materials.

• Mentor engineers and promote best practices in reliability engineering and automation.

Who You Are

Infrastructure Development

• Strong programming skills in Python or Go (Java/Spring Boot is a plus).

• Deep experience with AWS and building/operating production systems at scale.

• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, Helm, CNI, and Ingress networking.

• Strong understanding of Kubernetes primitives and patterns (deployments, services, operators, etc.).

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Terragrunt, or similar).

• Solid understanding of Linux systems and networking fundamentals.

Observability & Operations

• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or CloudWatch.

• Familiarity with incident management practices and production support in a microservices environment.

• Experience with messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, SQS) and relational databases (e.g., Aurora, RDS) is a plus.

Security & Identity

• Working knowledge of SSO, SAML, OAuth, and identity providers (Okta is a plus).

• Experience with AWS IAM (roles, policies, IRSA), VPC security groups, and Kubernetes security primitives (RBAC, network policies, pod security standards, secrets management).

DevOps & Delivery

• Experience with CI/CD and GitOps tools such as GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Jenkins, FluxCD, or Bitbucket.

• Comfortable working in agile environments (Scrum, Kanban).

Mindset & Collaboration

• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills with a proactive, systems-thinking mindset.

• Passion for automation: “If you have to do it more than once, automate it.”

• Excellent communication skills and ability to work across distributed teams.

• A collaborative team player who can influence, mentor, and lead through technical expertise.

• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI and data-driven insights to improve productivity and outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience

• Experience supporting large-scale SaaS platforms

• AWS or Kubernetes certifications

• Exposure to modern platform frameworks such as KubeVela (OAM) or Crossplane

• Contributions to open-source projects

Why Guidewire?

• Work on a mission-critical global platform used by leading P&C insurers worldwide

• Solve complex, real-world infrastructure problems at genuine scale

• Be part of a collaborative, high-impact engineering culture grounded in integrity, rationality, and collegiality

• Opportunity to shape the future of a rapidly evolving cloud platform

• A culture of curiosity and innovation where engineers are empowered to leverage AI and emerging technologies.

#LI-AA1

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.