Guidewire Architect

This position provides architecture leadership for AF Group's core insurance platform ecosystem, with a primary focus on Guidewire InsuranceSuite and Guidewire Cloud initiatives. The Architect II will partner with business and technology teams to design scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions across PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, ClaimCenter, ContactManager, and associated integration platforms. The role will help define architecture standards, modernization strategies, cloud adoption patterns, and integration approaches supporting AF Group's strategic Guidewire roadmap.

• Provides architecture leadership and technical direction for Guidewire InsuranceSuite applications, including PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, ClaimCenter, and ContactManager.
• Designs and review Guidewire Cloud and on-premises solution architectures, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture standards and business objectives.
• Defines integration strategies between Guidewire applications and enterprise systems utilizing APIs, event-driven architectures, messaging platforms, and cloud services.
• Partners with Guidewire, system integrators, and internal development teams to evaluate and implement platform upgrades, cloud migrations, and modernization initiatives.
• Establishes Guidewire development, integration, deployment, and configuration best practices to ensure maintainable and scalable solutions.
• Provides technical leadership for Guidewire application performance, security, scalability, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Evaluates new Guidewire capabilities, accelerators, and cloud services and provide recommendations for adoption.
• Accountable for adhering to corporate architecture standards, ensuring technology standards and best practices are maintained across the organization and contributing to corporate architecture strategy-setting.
• Participates in formulating solution estimates and work planning including determining appropriate task sequencing and identification of technical skill sets required.
• Builds consensus around principles of infrastructure architecture and interprets and clarifies these principles.
• Participates in the evaluation, selection and implementation of technology solutions including providing detailed analysis of pros and cons and build vs buy options.
• Maintains operational, architectural and design documentation including procedures, task lists, and blueprints.
• Evaluates strengths and flaws in infrastructure design including performance, quality, availability, simplicity of design, security, and total cost of ownership.
• Assists in the facilitation of project handoffs including preparing documentation, educating, and supporting to ensure smooth transitions.
• Establishes and maintains relationships with IT and business area partners and provides consultation to the business teams.
• Troubleshoots, recommends, and executes action plans for issue resolution.
• Selects and designs tools that allow reuse of design components and patterns between projects.
• Continually works to enhance breadth and depth of knowledge and experience.  Benchmarks technology strategies and architectures.  Monitors and anticipates trends and investigates organizational objectives and needs.  Prepares bench marking reports and presentations.
• Promotes implementation of new technology, solutions, and methods to improve business processes, efficiency, effectiveness, and value delivered to customers.
• Develops actual working solutions or prototypes based on their own designs and resolves any issues that arise.
• Stays updated on current technology trends and industry best practices.
• Provides technical leadership and works effectively with different teams including Product Managers, Project Managers, and Engineers.
• Fosters a healthy, collaborative, and productive scrum team culture.
• Works with other leads in a project setting to define and execute a software architecture that is sustainable, flexible, and scalable.
• Leads key initiative design, highly capable to complete tasks both independently with minimal guidance and leading a team technically.
• Exchanges information clearly and precisely, in verbal or written form, by sharing ideas, reporting facts and other information, responding to questions, and employing active listening techniques.
• Works with networks and understands internet security protocols. Analyze existing systems to ensure adequate security and business continuality. 
• Works with web servers, application server administration and web applications deployment. 
• Routing and switching technologies including TCP, UDP, IP, BGP, OSPF, Spanning Tree, 802.x, WLAN, ISO models.
• Create designs to support appropriate technology choices!
• Create strategy for server & network technologies.
• Promotes and conducts software development best practices such as dependency injection and test-driven development to create high-quality, flexible, scalable applications that can be easily configured for different client needs.
• Assisting in the structuring of data including methods of storing and retrieving data
• Facilitates and creates reporting tools and automating the delivery of reports to dashboards. 
• Creates data interfaces and facilitates API extraction of data.
• Design and architect Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions
• Provide technical leadership experience with IAM Tools like ForgeRock IAM and CyberArk.  Acting as a technical authority for IAM technologies while providing technology guidance to other IT teams.
• Define solutions and best practices for a suite of ForgeRock IAM products and services used within the firm to secure identity and access to resources, sensitive data, applications, and services.
• Support IAM becoming a product differentiator by providing best in class support and functionality.
• Guide project teams with the implementations consistent with company policies and practices 
• Align projects with business and IT strategy to help projects sustain alignment with company policy’s and standards.
• Write policy and standards as needed to sustain company compliance with regulatory changes.
• Work with development and QA teams to ensure the use of secure coding practices and verification methods.
• Development of product roadmaps and align efforts to meet security goals.

EDUCATION 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related area required. Master’s preferred. 
• Continuous learning, as defined by the Company’s learning philosophy, is required.  
• Azure or AWS Solution Architect certification or progress toward certification is highly preferred and encouraged.
• Prior development and scrum/agile experience. Experience with RDBMS (Oracle 10g/11g, MS SQL 2005/2008), including database design, developing stored procedures and functions, and performance tuning. 
• Working experiences with No-SQL databases such as MongoDB, Azure CosmosDB, AWS DynamoDB are preferred.

EXPERIENCE

• 5 years’ experience in the implementation and maintenance of enterprise level systems.
• Experience in a large complex enterprise environment, preferably in Healthcare, Insurance, or similarly government-regulated environment.

QUALIFICATIONS 

• Experience with Guidewire InsuranceSuite, including PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, ClaimCenter, or ContactManager.
• Experience with Guidewire Self-Managed and Cloud Platform and Guidewire integration frameworks.
• Knowledge of Guidewire APIs, event frameworks, messaging patterns, and integration architectures.
• Experience in property and casualty (P&C) insurance systems and business processes.
• Familiarity with Guidewire upgrade, cloud migration, and modernization initiatives.
• Experience designing solutions leveraging Azure and Guidewire Cloud services.
• Strong communication and written skills. Ability to work out differences of opinions and publish scalable and quality system design based on specification.
• Strong knowledge of OOAD and multi-tier architectures, including MVC/MVP/MVVM design patterns.
• Strong knowledge with enterprise software development techniques such as SOA / EDA based design, Microservices using Web API, Queue based processing using any messaging technologies such as RabbitMQ, MSMQ etc. 
• Ability to develop and maintain large scale, high performing, high transactional systems.
• Ability to diagram and document designs and requirements.
• Knowledge of Security protocols and the design, integration, and maintenance of these protocols.
• Ability to manage, assess and negotiate with vendors.
• Ability to mentor and lend guidance to team as needed.
• Expert knowledge of architectural design.
• Demonstrated ability to work in teams and capture ideas into strategy and standards.
• Ability to execute governance of cloud standards and strategy.
• Ability to set strategic architectural direction.
• Ability to identify architecture components for reuse.
• A clear understanding of the architecture standards.
• Ability to communicate effectively with Leadership, Business Partners, and IT Infrastructure team.
• Knowledge of IT and IT’s priorities, strategies, and current capabilities.
• Knowledge of technology and the current technical environment.
• Ability to breakdown the requirements into projects and determine timelines and dependencies with the other domains/ projects.
• Understanding of ongoing and planned projects and their inter-dependencies/ timelines.
• Strong analytical, problem solving and planning skills.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment.
• Flexibility to adapt readily to changing business needs.
• Enthusiastic, can-do attitude with the drive to learn and improve.

Infrastructure:

• Ability to understand networks and internet security protocols. Analyze existing systems to ensure adequate security and business continuality. 
• Knowledge of web server and application server administration and web applications deployment. 
• Knowledge of server sizing and performance
• Knowledge of network design and performance
• Familiarity of routing and switching technologies such as TCP, UDP, IP, BGP, OSPF, Spanning Tree, 802.x, WLAN, and ISO models
• Knowledge of Firewalls and ACLs
• Knowledge of VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hypervisor
• Familiarity of Cloud Infrastructure including infrastructure as code (prefer Azure and AWS)
• Knowledge of patching and assessment technologies 

Data:

• Knowledge and understanding of structuring data and the methods of storing and retrieving data.
• Knowledge of data masking and encryption, reporting tools, and automating the delivery of reports to dashboards and customers
• Ability to create data interfaces and API extraction of data.
• Familiarity of data tools such as Data Bricks, PowerBI, ElasticSearch, and SAS
• Knowledge of relational databases such as Amazon RDS, Greenplum, Hadoop, MS SQL, Postgress, MySQL, & Oracle SQL
• DBA skills such as DBA backup and performance tuning.
• Strong statistical skills. 

Identity:

• Ability to develop IAM strategies and roadmaps that support business goals.
• Ability to design and architect Identity and Access Management solutions.
• Knowledge of IAM tools such as ForgeRock, SailPoint, Oracle Access Manager
• Knowledge of privileged access management experience with tools like CyberArk
• Strong knowledge of modern Identity Management protocols and standards, frameworks, federation technologies and solutions (for example ADFS, SAML, MFA, LDAP, Service Principals)

 PAY RANGE: 

“Actual compensation decision relies on the consideration of internal equity, candidate’s skills and professional experience, geographic location, market and other potential factors. It is not standard practice for an offer to be at or near the top of the range, and therefore a reasonable estimate for this role is between $82,800 and $217,100.”

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We will not tolerate discrimination or harassment in any form. Candidates for the position stated above are hired on an "at will" basis.  Nothing herein is intended to create a contract.

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