Senior Manager - Data / AI Platform

Location: India - Bangalore

Summary

Guidewire provides outstanding software for the second-largest financial services industry in the world: insurance. We deliver the core applications that Property and Casualty (P/C) insurers use to build their products, sell policies, settle claims, and bill their customers. Through Guidewire Cloud, our SaaS platform, we enable customers to rapidly innovate, scale securely, and drive measurable value.

Guidewire’s Product Development and Operations (PDO) team is hiring a dynamic leader to run cloud-native, big-data services that power the Guidewire Data Platform (GDP). The team works on scalable data ingestion, multi-tenant data platforms, data curation and transformation, federated data access, and platform reliability—helping customers turn InsuranceSuite data into trusted, actionable insights. Based in Bengaluru, India, the team collaborates with engineering, product, and global platform teams to deliver secure, reliable, and self-service data experiences.

As a Senior Manager – Data/ AI Platform,Deliver scalable, secure, and reliable Data and AI/ML services that enable mission-critical P&C insurance workloads.

Translate real customer use cases into clear product requirements and measurable outcomes.

Raise the bar on engineering excellence, team performance, and cross-functional execution.

Strengthen Guidewire’s voice in the market through thought leadership and community engagement. You’ll build high-performing teams, drive product outcomes, and champion a customer-first mindset across engineering and cross-functional partners.

What you’ll do

Lead and grow multiple pods that architect and deliver cloud-native Data Platform services

on AWS and Kubernetes, using modern data streaming stacks and a Data Mesh architecture.

Drive the design and delivery of Gen AI solutions—including MCP servers and agentic

services—and build AI-native proficiency across your teams.

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.

Identify and enable data monetization opportunities, turning platform capabilities into

customer-facing, revenue-generating products.

Partner with product management and engineering leadership to set and deliver quarterly

and annual goals, framing problems and defining success metrics.

Orchestrate cross-functional collaboration across PM, Architecture, SRE/SecOps, Support,

and Field Engineering to land features on time and with quality.

Lead through ambiguity with iterative development: lean discovery, rapid prototyping, A/B

and canary rollouts, and telemetry-driven iteration, pivoting quickly on customer feedback.

Run a rigorous performance management cadence: goals, 1:1s, growth plans, competency

rubrics, feedback loops, and fair evaluations.

Champion engineering best practices: API-first design, SDD, IaC/MLOps, observability,

chaos/resilience testing, and data governance.

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 when teams encounter complex engineering challenges.

Manage execution risk: roadmap and quarterly planning, dependency management, incident postmortems, and proactive risk mitigation.

Serve as an external evangelist: speak at conferences, panels, and meetups; publish blogs and whitepapers; and partner with Marketing/Comms to strengthen the Guidewire brand.

What you’ll bring

16+ years in software engineering with 4+ years managing managers or multi-pod teams

building cloud/data platforms.

Proven delivery of enterprise-scale, cloud-native data platform services at scale (throughput,

latency, cost), with a track record of production ownership.

Hands-on experience building and operating SaaS products, and delivering Gen AI solutions

in production (e.g., LLM-based features, MCP servers, RAG, or agentic workflows).

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, with the ability to balance people leadership with active technical engagement and accountability for engineering outcomes.

Proven experience leading a Data/ AI Platform Engineering team, with accountability for technical direction, architecture, engineering execution, reliability, scalability, and developer experience.

Experience with data monetization—packaging data and platform capabilities into products

that drive measurable business value.

Strength in product thinking: framing problems, defining success metrics, and shipping

iteratively toward outcomes.

Excellent cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management, with clear written and

verbal communication.

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.

A people leader who coaches for impact, sets high standards, and gives actionable feedback.

Nice to have: Insurance domain, Analytics/ML pipelines, and data privacy/compliance

experience.