Lead Performance Engineer Guidewire Software

Are you an experience software performance engineer? Are you looking for a leadership opportunity at a mid-sized software company focused on delivering high-quality products and ensuring customer success? Would you enjoy applying your expertise to help further organize and bolster an already strong performance testing and tuning operation? If so, we would like to talk to you.
Guidewire builds large and extraordinarily complex applications that have to work reliably with significant data volumes and under heavy load. Our applications are highly configurable, and we need to test out-of-the-box configurations as well as common or risky customizations. We are looking for thoughtful, creative and highly-skilled engineers who love tackling the deep and difficult problems inherent in performance tuning, relish squeezing every last bit of performance from every layer of the application stack and, most importantly, are capable of detecting and fixing potential as well as actual performance issues. We're particularly interested in engineers who would enjoy developing tools to improve and expedite our performance tuning work, both internally and in our customers' environments.
In addition, our performance efforts could use a strong leader to ensure that efforts are coordinated and best practices are shared across application teams. This position requires a healthy mix of experience, technical talent, flexibility, and people skills.
Our development process is sustainable (no death marches), work/life balance friendly, and we pride ourselves on a calm, systematic, and rational approach to our business. See and hear from our employees at http://www.guidewire.com/about_guidewire/careers.
If you are happy when coding and even happier identifying and solving software performance problems, we would love to hear from you.
Responsibilities
This is a key leadership role with our Product Development organization. As a Lead Performance Engineer, you will:

• Influence and collaborate with product managers across our product suite to define and scope performance benchmark targets across numerous dimension and platforms on a variety of software and hardware stacks.
• Coordinate performance testing and tuning activities across all application teams.
• Collaborate with our application teams to achieve performance objectives on multiple product lines.
• Identify and implement improvements to our performance testing and tuning tools and operations. Identify and fill gaps in our test coverage and high-impact improvements to our tooling.
• Push the state of the art in realistic, large-scale, high volume testing techniques.
• Write or significantly contribute to performance white papers and benchmark reports, ensuring consistency, completeness and relevancy of information.
• Collaborate with our Services architects to improve our model for sizing customer production environments.
• Coordinate with and assist our Services organization with their efforts to build a customer-focused performance tuning operation.

Requirements
We care most about your critical thinking skills and technical talent. However, the following skills and prior experience are desired.

• 5+ years of performance testing and tuning experience, especially with large-scale, enterprise software
• Natural curiosity about anomalies and proclivity for resolving performance issues
• Ability to influence others based on experience, evidence and reason
• Strong people skills
• Healthy balance of idealism and pragmatism
• Deep technical expertise in any of the following is helpful: profiling, leak detection, Java VM tuning, SQL tuning, application servers, networks, Linux, Windows
• Experience with multiple database platforms, including Oracle and SQL Server
• Experience tuning with multi-byte datasets
• Web-based applications, Web Services

Guidewire Software is a leading provider of flexible core systems that enable property/casualty insurers to deliver insurance the way they want to. Guidewire builds high quality software that consistently works as promised. Designed for maximum flexibility and scalability, Guidewire solutions give carriers the capability to deliver excellent service to policyholders and agents and increase market share â€" while lowering operating costs. The Guidewire Insurance Suiteâ"¢, consisting of Guidewire PolicyCenter®, Guidewire BillingCenter®, and Guidewire ClaimCenter®, spans the entire insurance lifecycle â€" underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims management. Guidewire is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in London, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto. For more information, visit www.guidewire.com.
PLEASE NOTE: We are only able to hire candidates who have the legal right to work in the United States. Principals only. No phone calls, please

Location:	San Mateo, CA United States