Senior Guidewire Technical Lead

Background

Established in 2013 and now based in Blackrock, the Dublin Technology Center delivers best in industry infrastructure and security services across the Zurich Insurance Group. Whether it's with one of our core capabilities such as Cyber Security, or working with our Cloud or Crowdsourcing teams, our customers are our priority. We work hard to deliver our services excellently with our unique talent. We are committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We believe a diversity of ideas fosters innovation and engagement, allows us to attract the best people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. Qualified individuals from all walks of life are encouraged to apply. This role may be available part-time or full time. This is because we want the best people for our roles, and we recognise that sometimes those people aren’t available full-time. Please talk to us at interview about the flexibility you may need.

Zurich Dublin Technology Center is looking for a Senior Guidewire Technical Lead

The role of the Senior Guidewire Technical Lead exists to technically lead, manage, and mentor a team of developers who develop and test software within the Zurich Guidewire Team (ZGT).
The role promotes technical excellence within the ZGT team by applying and promoting Guidewire best practices and ensuring that solutions are designed, developed and unit tested in accordance with internal standards and industry best practice. 
The Zurich Guidewire Technical Lead must be hands on technically and able to lead and mentor the team to deliver effective and efficient software solutions to stakeholders.
Key tasks will be to structure, manage, review and develop software solutions to high performing technical standards and adhering to Guidewire (GW) best practice.
This is a senior role responsible to create a cohesive team that can deliver effective and efficient deliverables across the Global Zurich landscape, whilst supporting the ZGT strategy and ensuring best practice for processes and procedures.

Your Role

As a Senior Guidewire Technical Lead you will be leading and managing a team developing solutions for various Guidewire related projects. Your main responsibilities will involve:

•    In partnership with Zurich’s Group Claims organisation, responsible for driving the development of the Guidewire ecosystems across Zurich. 
•    Accelerate Guidewire ecosystems that foster innovation, collaboration and reuse across the various countries and functions that use the system.
•    Leverage technology at a global level to drive operational efficiencies in the claims handling process, better outcomes, and an improved client experience.
•    Work with all Guidewire Business Units (BUs) to understand opportunities & remediate pain points.
•    Work with the ZGT Product Owner, Product Manager and ZGT Architects to prioritise the backlog and pipeline of work for the ZGT, including new Cloud capabilities & ensuring Guidewire’s offering meets Zurich’s requirements. 
•    Proactively identify and encourage sharing of solutions across countries to help drive innovation in a faster & more efficiency manner. 
•    Bring technical skills to the fore, developing more junior development staff.
•    Develop greater consistency in the use of our systems, foster the awareness of and actively drive the reuse of existing global solution capabilities and in partnership with GTO (Group Technology Office) functions drive the development and implementation of new global solution capabilities. 
•    Support the wider environment (e.g. Claims Data and Analytics team) in the capture of data to support our data and analytics capabilities and share with business partners. 

Key Responsibilities

•    Responsible to lead a team of ZGT developers.
•    Identify, analyse, design and develop GW code, APIs and integration flows.
•    Design and develop framework components within GW.
•    Create and review logical designs and low-level designs, working with other technical leads and solution architects.
•    Provide support for integration testing and non-functional testing.
•    Actively collaborate with business analysts, architects, subject matter experts and testers to ensure functional and architectural designs are agreed and understood by the developers in the team.
•    Lead application design workshops to ensure functional and architectural designs are broken down into technical tasks with accurate estimates.
•    Monitor progress on a daily basis and ensure the development team remain focussed and are on track – resolving technical impediments and liaising with the ZGT Architects where necessary.
•    Promote good team practices, ensuring compliance to Zurich, GW and industry coding standards for all aspects of development.
•    Provide coaching and mentoring to all members of the ZGT development team.
•    Support the development of global GW enabled projects. 
•    Able to take the lead on design and development tasks, explaining to the team and the wider GW community the approach, the benefit and the technical solution as required.
•    Explain technical issues to project managers, developers, team leads, architects and business analysts in an easy-to-understand manner and recommend solutions.
•    Work with cross-functional teams to define, design and deliver new features.
•    Contribute to sprint planning and provide feedback to retrospectives.
•    Support the service catalogue approach to drive accessibility and re-use.
 

Your Skills and Experience

As a Senior Guidewire Technical Lead your skills and qualifications will include:

Mandatory Technical and Delivery skills and experience

•    Minimum of 2 years’ proven experience of leading, managing, coaching, mentoring and developing a team of Software Developers, with a track record of improving development practices.
•    Minimum of 5 years’ proven commercial software development experience relating to some of the following tools and technologies: 
o    Java 8 (or higher) Programming (essential)
o    Web Services (SOAP and RESTful)
o    SQL queries and database access tools.
o    XML technologies (XSD, XPath, XQuery, XSL, and XSLT).
o    Relational databases
o    Version control systems
o    Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, JSON)
•    Full stack development experience covering front end, back end, microservices as well as data management.
•    Commercial experience with one or more of the following tools and technologies: 
o    Linux tools and CLI
o    Distributed source code management tools - ideally Git and Bitbucket.
o    CI tools such as Jenkins
o    Atlassian Suite E.g. Jira
o    Test automation tools such as SOAPUI and Selenium IDE/WebDriver
o    Python
o    OpenText WEM/Portal/Process Suite/StreamServe products
•    Strong knowledge of software architecture and design patterns.
•    Experience of estimation, code review and mentoring skills.
•    Keen attention to detail with strong problem-solving skills, coupled with an enquiring mind and the ability to learn quickly.
•    Ability to drive innovation and change across teams through collaborative working and effective influencing skills.
•    Experience of agile software development methodologies such as Scrum. Knowledge of the AGILE methodology/Scaled Agile Framework, SDLC processes would be preferable.
•    Excellent stakeholder management.
•    Experience in the Insurance or Financial Services Sector.
•    Strong communication skills both written and verbal, to liaise with clients to interpret their issues into technical solutions.
•    Education to degree standard or equivalent experience (Computer Sciences discipline).

Behavioural competencies / leadership qualities

• Collaborative Technical Team leader, adept at enabling structure and clear direction to team
• Self-starter with stakeholder/relationship and influencing skills
• Positive, can-do attitude with the ability to encourage and motivate fellow team members.
• Deliver quality solution by adopting methodologies and best practice
• Logical thinker with strong problem-solving skills
• Experience of working to and delivering to deadlines
• Builds and maintains effective relationships with colleagues and customers; is respected and trusted
• Flexible in working under changing and different work settings
• Convey a strong sense of urgency and drives issues to closure
   

Desirable but not essential

• Experience of working on Guidewire implementations/new products from scratch
• Hands on experience using Gosu
• Experience with Claims / Underwriting disciplines
• Leadership experience providing services across multiple projects / multiple business units
• Ability to think outside of the box and be innovative by keeping abreast of new trends, identifying opportunities to bring in change for business benefit
• Global, critical, innovative thinking with good presentation skills

Additional Information

Primary work location is Trident House, Blackrock. Position is Dublin-based but occasional travel may be required to other Zurich locations.

If you value an exciting and varied working environment and meet the above requirements, then our recruiter is looking forward to receiving your application by clicking on the button “Apply online”.

Who we are

Zurich is one of Ireland's leading insurance companies providing a wide range of general insurance and life insurance products and services. The company employs over 1,000 people across its locations in Dublin and Wexford. 

Zurich is a strong brand. Zurich in Ireland is part of Zurich Insurance Group, a leading multi-line insurer that serves its customers in global and local markets. Our 55,000 employees worldwide form the basis of our success, helping our customers in 210 countries and territories to understand and protect themselves from risk. In order to deliver our services, we offer a competitive compensation package and interesting opportunities for further training & development. As a Zurich employee you benefit from a multitude of advantages as well as a strong culture, characterized by acceptance, diversity and team spirit. 

At Zurich we are an equal opportunity employer. We attract and retain the best qualified individuals available, without regard to race/ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability.