Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering (Application) EMEA

Summary

Job Description

Location: Krakow, Poland (In Office)

About Guidewire

At Guidewire, we deliver the software that Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance companies rely on to protect their customers during crises, natural disasters, accidents, and cyber risks. Our core applications enable insurers to sell and underwrite policies, settle claims, and bill their customers. We also offer a suite of innovative products for data management, digital portals, and predictive analytics.

Hundreds of insurers worldwide use Guidewire's products, running on our cutting-edge Guidewire Cloud Platform, to handle billions of dollars in business. We are dedicated to providing the tools and technology that help insurers protect and support their customers when they need it most.

The Opportunity

In this role, you will apply core principles from the Google SRE handbook to real-world challenges. You will turn company strategy into clear goals for your team and use a software-first approach to solve complex infrastructure and reliability issues. Your goal is to build and manage a team that keeps our cloud solutions highly reliable.

What You'll Do

• Manage and mentor a team of 10 to 17 SRE professionals, spanning senior individual contributors and technical leads. You will build a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
• Set operational goals and work plans. You will guide the team in SRE best practices like observability, reliability engineering, and Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs).
• Turn broader company strategy into clear department goals. Your decisions will directly shape the short-term results of the EMEA SRE group.
• Lead the strategy for large cross-functional projects and solve complex, loosely defined reliability problems.
• Oversee regional incident management. You will act as an escalation point and ensure blameless postmortems lead to real preventative actions.
• Work closely with management across different departments. You will use strong communication skills to align stakeholders on complex issues while maintaining good relationships.
• Manage your department's resources and schedules to meet business goals and keep operations running smoothly.
• Promote automation to reduce manual work, improve efficiency, and help engineering teams focus on delivering value.
  

What You'll Bring

• Strong knowledge of core SRE principles and a clear understanding of the difference between reactive operations and proactive reliability engineering.
• Leadership experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field, with a track record of managing a team of 10 or more engineers and team leads.
• Strong problem-solving skills. You can analyze complex distributed systems and choose the right methods to get results.
• Excellent communication skills. You can align multiple viewpoints and convince stakeholders to support your department's goals.
• Typically requires 10 to 12 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree, 8 years with a Master's degree, 5 years with a PhD, or equivalent work experience.
  

Required Skills

• A foundational background in software engineering, with prior hands-on experience building business applications and systems. You bring a software-first approach and architectural knowledge of systems built in Go, Python, or Java (we are looking for an engineering leader, not a traditional systems administrator).
• High emotional intelligence (EQ) and a proven track record of managing diverse engineering teams. You lead through Guidewire's core values of Integrity, Rationality, and Collegiality—making evidence-based decisions, building truthful relationships, and working alongside your team as a professional equal.
• Proven experience implementing SRE principles (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, blameless postmortems) across an engineering team.
• Experience managing major incidents for large-scale systems, ideally with hands-on experience as an Incident Commander.
• Deep expertise in building, deploying, and running scalable and reliable infrastructure within AWS and Kubernetes ecosystems.
• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and GitOps principles.
• Experience leading teams that build and support microservices, leveraging frameworks like Spring Framework and React.
• Proven experience leveraging modern observability and APM tools, with a strong preference for Datadog (monitoring, dashboards, synthetics, etc).
• Experience managing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, TeamCity, or GitHub Actions.
• Experience with people management in Workday and managing workstreams using ticketing tools like JIRA Service Management and ideation tools like AHA.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, role-based access control (RBAC), and vulnerability management.
  

Preferred Skills

• AWS and/or Kubernetes certifications (e.g., CKA, CKAD).
• Familiarity with Guidewire's product suite (InsuranceSuite) or the Guidewire Cloud Platform is a significant plus.
• Knowledge of Guidewire-specific technologies such as Gosu.
• Interest or experience in emerging technologies like Kubevela and the application of agentic AI/LLMs to SRE practices.
• Experience with enterprise business tools such as Coupa, Concur, and Salesforce.

Why Guidewire

This is an opportunity to join a mission-driven company and make a real impact in the lives of people facing challenges. You'll work with cutting-edge technology, collaborate with talented peers, and grow your skills in a culture that values innovation, teamwork, and work-life balance. We offer competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and opportunities for career development.

If you're a Senior Manager of SRE who combines deep technical expertise with a passion for problem-solving and a commitment to reliability, we'd love to hear from you. Join us in building the software that helps insurers care for their customers when they need it most.

Since this is a senior leadership role, you will not be part of a formal on-call rotation. However, you will need to be available outside of standard business hours (including evenings, weekends, and holidays) for major escalations. Candidates must be willing to accept this responsibility to support the business and our customers.

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.