Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Tech Lead

Summary

Join Guidewire’s Product Development & Operations (PDO) organization as a cornerstone of our Site Reliability Engineering team. We are the architects of stability for the Guidewire Cloud Platform, ensuring the world’s leading P&C insurers can depend on our mission-critical applications. As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Tech Lead you aren't just maintaining systems; you are defining the technical vision for how we operate at scale, automating the complex, and leading a high-performing "pod" of engineers to deliver a resilient, self-healing cloud ecosystem.

The Role

This is a dual-accountability leadership role. You will act as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (P5)—providing deep technical expertise and cross-team architectural influence—and as a Tech Lead, where you will serve as the technical engine for your pod. You will bridge the gap between long-term reliability strategy and the daily execution of your team, ensuring that our applications are not only stable but also evolving through elite software engineering practices.

Job Description

What You’ll Do

• Technical Leadership: Serve as the primary technical authority for your SRE pod. You will own the technical design for pod deliverables, oversee production deployments, and act as the final point of escalation for complex technical impediments.
• Architectural Influence: Design and implement systemic improvements to our AWS and Kubernetes-based environments. You won't just fix incidents; you will lead the creation of frameworks that prevent them across the entire organization.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Protect the pod’s sprint goals by breaking down high-level requirements into actionable technical tasks. Lead by example through hands-on coding (AI, Python, Go, or Java), rigorous code reviews, and the promotion of "Clean Code" and testing standards.  Triage and assign work.
• Toil Elimination & Automation: Champion the transition from manual operations to "Operations as Code." You will lead the development of automated runbooks, self-healing systems, and advanced CI/CD pipelines (Terraform, GitOps) to reduce operational friction.
• Mentorship & Growth: Actively coach and mentor P1–P5 engineers. You are responsible for raising the "technical bar" of the team, fostering a culture of curiosity, and ensuring the professional growth of your peers through constructive feedback.
• Incident Management & Post-mortems: Lead the response to high-severity incidents. You will facilitate blameless post-mortems that go beyond "human error" to identify deep architectural weaknesses, ensuring Guidewire learns and hardens its systems after every event.
• AI & Innovation: Proactively identify opportunities to integrate AI/ML and data-driven insights into our observability stack (Datadog/Resolve) to move from reactive monitoring to predictive reliability.
• Production Stewardship & On-Call Excellence: Participate in and provide technical oversight for a 24x7 on-call rotation. As a P5 Tech Lead, you will act as a high-level escalation point for complex production incidents, ensuring rapid restoration of service while driving the "blameless" culture and post-incident analysis required to eliminate recurring issues.

What You’ll Bring

• Deep Technical Mastery: 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or Software Engineering, with at least 3+ years in a Staff-level, Technical Lead, Manager or Sr. Manager capacity.
• Cloud Native Expert: Expert-level command of AWS ecosystem and Kubernetes (EKS) orchestration. You should have a proven track record of managing large-scale, distributed cloud environments.
• Automation Specialist: Advanced proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation) and configuration management (Ansible/Puppet) within a GitOps framework.
• Software Engineering Acumen: Strong software engineering foundation with the ability to write production-grade code in languages like Python, Go, or Java or with tools such as Claude Code, CodeEx or CoPilot.
• Observability Visionary: Deep experience building comprehensive monitoring, SLIs/SLOs, and tracing strategies using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or Splunk.
• Leadership Mindset: Proven ability to manage "up and out"—communicating technical risks to stakeholders and collaborating with Product and Engineering managers to align reliability goals with feature delivery.
• Operational Discipline: Experience managing on-call rotations and a "safety-first" mindset. You understand that reliability is the most important feature of any product.

Your Impact

• In your first 90 days: You will take full ownership of your pod’s technical roadmap, identifying "low-hanging fruit" for automation and establishing yourself as the go-to technical resource for your team.
• In your first 6 months: You will have successfully led a major cross-pod initiative—such as a significant application migration/upgrade, a new observability standard, or a breakthrough in deployment velocity—measurable by a decrease in MTTR and an increase in system uptime.
• Long term: You will shape the future of SRE at Guidewire, influencing our global cloud strategy and building a legacy of engineering excellence that enables our customers to transform the insurance industry.

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.

Guidewire is proud to be a disability inclusive employer. We are committed to providing individualized accommodations and support to candidates for any part of our hiring process. If you think you may need disability-related accommodations, please email EmployAbility at [email protected], our disability partner, or schedule a call with an EmployAbility expert (calendar booking slot) for a confidential conversation.