Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Cloud/ Kubernetes Platform

Overview

Lead and develop Cloud Platform Engineering teams at Guidewire, combining hands-on technical leadership with people management to build secure, resilient, and scalable cloud platform capabilities for Guidewire Cloud.

What you'll do

• Lead and develop Cloud Platform Engineering teams: provide technical direction, coaching, and career development while building a culture of engineering excellence, ownership, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Build and develop engineering talent: establish clear expectations, provide regular feedback, manage performance, and develop engineers' technical and leadership capabilities.
• Foster an inclusive environment that encourages independent thinking, collaboration, and accountability for engineering outcomes.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership: work closely with engineers on complex technical problems, architectural decisions, design reviews, and implementation trade-offs.
• Help resolve technical roadblocks, challenge proposed solutions, and guide teams toward scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable designs.
• Remain technically engaged without becoming a bottleneck for implementation.
• Own engineering execution and outcomes: drive end-to-end delivery from planning and prioritization through implementation, rollout, and continuous improvement.
• Stay close to technical execution, identify engineering risks early, help resolve critical blockers, and ensure delivery decisions support quality and long-term platform health.
• Champion engineering excellence: drive adoption of API-first design, TDD, BDD, automated testing, GitOps, observability, secure coding, and continuous delivery.
• Champion collaborative engineering practices such as pair programming and spec-driven development, as the default way the team builds software, and help engineers new to them get comfortable.
• Provide practical technical guidance and promote engineering standards that improve code quality, maintainability, and delivery effectiveness.
• Shape platform strategy and architecture: partner with Product Management, Security, Architects, and engineering leaders to evolve the Cloud Platform roadmap.
• Evaluate architectural options, prioritize technical investments, address technical debt, and balance near-term delivery with scalability, reliability, security, and long-term platform evolution.
• Drive reliability and operational excellence: take accountability for platform reliability, availability, performance, security, and cost efficiency.
• Use operational metrics and SLOs to identify systemic issues, guide root-cause analysis, resolve recurring problems, and drive sustainable improvements.
• Drive AI-enabled engineering and automation: champion the responsible use of AI and automation across software development, testing, delivery, and platform operations.
• Identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity, reduce manual toil, accelerate delivery, and improve quality, using measurable outcomes to assess impact.
• Stay close to engineering: maintain the technical depth to engage in code and design reviews, understand implementation details, evaluate technical trade-offs, and provide actionable guidance.
• Drive continuous platform improvement: simplify architecture, modernize platform capabilities, reduce recurring engineering friction, improve developer experience, and balance immediate delivery needs with sustainable long-term improvements.

What you'll need

• Demonstrated ability to apply AI and automation to software engineering and platform operations, with a focus on practical adoption, measurable productivity improvements, and improved engineering outcomes.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong background in building, designing, and evolving SaaS products, cloud platforms, or platform engineering capabilities in a product-focused organization.
• Significant experience leading software engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development.
• Demonstrated prior experience managing a team of approximately 15 or more engineers, balancing people leadership with active technical engagement and accountability for engineering outcomes.
• Proven experience leading a Cloud Platform Engineering team or equivalent platform-focused engineering team, with accountability for technical direction, architecture, engineering execution, reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
• Strong hands-on software engineering background in Java, Go, or Python, with the ability to review code, evaluate implementation approaches, assess architectural designs, and guide engineers through complex technical challenges.
• Demonstrated technical depth that extends beyond earlier-career coding experience.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native and distributed systems architectures, preferably on AWS, including multi-tenant design, scalability, high availability, resilience, security, and operational excellence.
• Strong experience with cloud-native technologies and platform tooling, including Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tools, and modern CI/CD and Git-based deployment pipelines.
• Ability to guide technical decisions and help teams navigate implementation and operational challenges.
• Strong system design and distributed systems fundamentals, supported by practical experience designing, debugging, and operating production systems.
• Ability to guide root-cause analysis and make architectural decisions that improve resilience, observability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence through technical judgment, engineering credibility, and effective collaboration with engineers, technical leaders, cross-functional peers, and senior stakeholders.
• A calm, pragmatic, outcome-oriented leadership style under pressure, with sound technical judgment, a strong bias for action, and the ability to resolve complex problems while balancing immediate needs with long-term engineering improvements.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India.