Guidewire®

Careers

Welcome to Guidewire!

We're pleased that you are thinking of investing your time and energy in our company. You'll find some questions and answers below that are important when choosing a company; you'll also find links to the open positions by department. We hope that you'll find Guidewire to be a good fit.

View list of open positions >>

Working at Guidewire

• Why is this a great opportunity?
• What is Guidewire's special advantage?
• Whom will I be working with?
• Will I enjoy working at Guidewire?

Why is this a great opportunity?

Most startup technology companies make two mistakes: they try to build something that can be bought by every company in existence, to inflate their potential market; and they try to invent a whole new category of product, so they won't have any competitors. The problem is that if you think of a new type of product that you can sell to every industry, it can't possibly be very important, and no one will pay you much for it.

Instead, Guidewire targeted a very big, very important industry with poor computer systems, and set out to build better ones. Insurance is a critical, recession-proof industry in any modern economy. Without insurance, people don't buy houses or drive cars, and businesses don't hire workers. As a result, the U.S. property and casualty insurance industry brings in $500 billion in insurance premiums every year - and spends about $20 billion of that on information technology. Yet despite this, insurers are getting abysmal value for their money. The backbone of almost any insurance company - selling policies and paying claims - relies on aging, archaic mainframe or client/server systems that bear as little relationship to modern software as the Model T does to the Toyota Prius.

Every chief information officer in the industry wants better claims and policy systems, but until recently they had nothing to choose from. Whoever can use modern technology to build those systems - and prove that they can support thousands of users and billions of dollars worth of insurance - will dominate the insurance software landscape for decades to come.

Guidewire is the #1 developer of modern insurance software applications. We are the clear leader in claims systems: since 2004, we won more deals than any competitor, beating out companies like Accenture (the world's largest consulting firm) and SAP (the world's largest application software company). No other company can match our ability to use modern technology to solve complex business problems, and none has our track record of making customers successful and happy. As a result, we are well positioned to become the default system of choice for an entire industry.

How did we do it? By refusing to follow conventional wisdom, and by building the best software applications in the industry.

What is Guidewire's special advantage?

It's remarkable, if you think about it - companies that handle more than $10 billion dollars worth of business a year trust us to manage their claims and policies. These aren't lightweight peripheral systems - they are the core applications that the majority of employees use all day, every day. As a company, we're only five years old. How can we do this? How do we win these deals over our larger competitors, and how do we manage to deliver?

We have a number of advantages:

First, we had the good fortune to start Guidewire at a painful time for Silicon Valley. It gave us the opportunity to build slowly and to hire carefully. We used our time wisely to build a team of all-stars; they know and attract others of the same caliber. Our people simply outperform other teams.

Second, we use agile development approaches and test-driven development. This lets us build products with far fewer bugs in less time. We get to spend a lot more time writing software, and a lot less time fixing bugs and dealing with customer issues.

Third, we've been extremely successful with our customers (because of a combination of great product and skilled implementation).

Fourth, we understand our customers' needs more deeply than anyone else.

Fifth, we apply unique technology that our competitors can't match: a highly customizable and upgradable data model and UI platform; a built-in integration layer that lets us connect cleanly to all kinds of legacy systems; a huge variety of sophisticated business features; and a completely modern architecture designed from the ground up for testability and scalability.

Whom will I be working with?

At Guidewire you'll work with lots of bright colleagues; here are just a few:

Will I enjoy working at Guidewire?

Our people do--in fact, they love it--but why should you believe that? Every company in Silicon Valley says that they put customers first, and embrace quality, and treat their employees well - but if you've been around for a while, you know that talk is cheap. Very, very cheap...

So, we'll spare you the usual blather. We have an idea about what makes a happy life for employees: meaningful work, quality products, sound business strategy, ultra-competent colleagues, and plenty of freedom to innovate and create. Here are a few true stories - why don't you make up your own mind?

Story #1
We do all test-first development. We have more than 10,000 unit tests. Think we care about quality?

Story #2
An engineer and the CTO are talking about how best to write the tests for a new class. Another engineer leans over and says, "Why are you guys spending so much time on this? Our customers love our products, and they almost never find bugs. Isn't this excessive?" To which the CTO says, "What, you've been here for a year and you don't get it? We're not doing this for the customers - this is for us. Don't you want to find out just how good we can make our stuff?" Think you might like writing software this way?

Story #3
Our ClaimCenter 2.1 release was pretty scary. We had a short amount of time to build out a clustered architecture and finish a whole raft of features to get our first big customer live. At the same time, we were also unhappy with the progress we were making against our testing goals - so we decided to stop all new feature development for almost a month. We just decided that we weren't being honest with ourselves - we kept saying that developer testing was important, but we kept blowing it off. So, the entire team did nothing but build out our test infrastructure, re-architect for testability, write tests, and build automated testing tools. It really broke the logjam and got us going, and we've never looked back. How many other companies would do that?

Story #4
By the time we got into our ClaimCenter 3.0 release, we were so confident in our quality that we shared nightly builds directly with our customers - a full six months before release (and long before alpha). Imagine selling, or installing, or testing, or marketing, or building a product like that. Where else can you do that?

Story #5
Most groups at Guidewire work in monthly cycles called sprints. Each month, a group picks a new leader through an informal process of volunteering and taking turns. At the end of each month, the group gets together to discuss what worked well, what didn't, and what could be done to improve. Next month, they implement some of the improvements. This process works so well that we've never had to hire any full-time managers. Think you'll have a voice at Guidewire?

A Guidewire employee who refers a candidate for hire (and that candidate is made an offer), will receive a $4,000 bonus. This bonus will be paid on the next regular pay date 60 (sixty) days after the new hire's start date. The new hire and the referring employee must still be employed with Guidewire after 60 days to receive the bonus.