Senior Engineering Manager, Advanced Product Designer; APD

Summary

Join Guidewire’s Application Platform organization within Product Development & Operations (PDO), where we build the shared platform capabilities that underpin Guidewire’s cloud products and developer experience. Within this space, Advanced Product Designer (APD) is a core App Platform capability focused on product configuration and lifecycle management alongside services such as Rules, Package Manager, App Manager, and related platform tooling.
APD is a cloud-based product design capability that helps insurers design, and deploy insurance products more rapidly. It supports the full product lifecycle and helps customers define product structure, generate downstream artifacts, and accelerate delivery through Cloud APIs and related platform integrations.
As a Senior Engineering Manager for APD, you will lead multiple small engineering teams and their technical leads, guiding the evolution of APD on App Platform 2.0. This role combines people leadership, technical strategy, architectural stewardship, and cross-functional execution. You will help scale APD as a strategic product-modeling capability, strengthen its integration with adjacent App Platform services, and drive the next phase of Guidewire’s cloud, API, and AI-enabled product configuration experience.

Job Description

• Lead multiple APD engineering teams, typically 2–3 small teams and their technical leads, building a high-accountability, high-trust culture that emphasizes coaching, inclusion, innovation, and continuous learning.

• Drive the architecture, delivery, and operational maturity of APD on App Platform 2.0, ensuring services are scalable, secure, observable, and aligned to Guidewire engineering standards.

• Own delivery across APD’s key design-time and runtime capabilities, including the continued evolution of APD services, APIs, and supporting platform integrations.

• Partner closely with Product Management, Architecture, UX, Platform Engineering, Security, and SRE to translate product strategy into execution plans, drive launches, and ensure APD meets customer, compliance, and reliability expectations.

• Help shape APD’s role as the product-model source of truth across the platform, including its relationship to schemas, rules, APIs, downstream digital experiences, and broader App Platform services.

• Drive platform stewardship by working across adjacent capabilities such as Rules, Schema Editor, Package Manager, App Manager, and other lifecycle services to improve interoperability, reuse, and developer experience.

• Champion responsible adoption of AI, automation, and data-driven engineering practices across the organization, both in how teams build software and in how APD capabilities evolve over time.

• Establish strong execution discipline across multiple teams by setting clear priorities, improving planning and delivery predictability, and ensuring high-quality outcomes across feature delivery, reliability, and security.

• Hire, coach, and develop senior engineers and technical leads, raising the technical and leadership bar while creating growth opportunities for the organization.

• At Guidewire, we foster a culture of curiosity, innovation, and responsible use of AI—empowering our teams to continuously leverage emerging technologies and data-driven insights to enhance productivity and outcomes.

• Demonstrated ability to embrace AI and apply it to engineering leadership, product delivery, and team productivity, using data-driven insight to improve outcomes.

• Extensive software engineering experience in SaaS or platform product development, with substantial experience managing engineering teams and leading through technical leads or multiple teams.

• Strong hands‑on technical background in Java and modern backend engineering, with depth in distributed systems, microservices, cloud-native architecture, and secure multi‑tenant platforms.

• Proven experience building and operating cloud applications on modern platforms such as AWS, including Kubernetes, containerization, CI/CD, and Dev Ops practices.

• Experience driving architectural decisions, design reviews, and technical execution for platform or enterprise software products.

• Demonstr…