Guidewire Overview

At Guidewire, we understand the benefit of having people invested in the success of the company for the long haul, and we're committed to creating an environment that keeps people here.

An Exceptional Opportunity

There's a Silicon Valley saying, "If you can see the bandwagon, it's too late to hop on." In 2001, when we started the company, we realized that one of the biggest industries in the world had been largely ignored by software companies. That was odd, because 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 new employees. As a result, the worldwide property and casualty insurance industry brings in around $1.3 trillion in insurance premiums every year – and spends about $50 billion of that on information technology. Yet despite this, insurers were getting abysmal value for their money. The backbone of almost any insurance company – selling policies, billing customers, and paying claims – relies on aging, archaic mainframe or client/server systems.

So, we set out to provide modern replacements for these systems. These are extraordinarily complex pieces of software that handle billions of dollars worth of financial transactions. Despite early predictions from people who thought that insurance companies would never buy from a startup company, Guidewire has become the #1 developer of modern insurance software applications. We are the clear global leader in claims systems: since 2004, we have won more deals than any competitor, beating out companies like Accenture and SAP. More recently, we have rapidly been acquiring customers with our newly introduced policy and billing systems. No other company that serves our industry can match our ability to use modern technology to solve complex business problems, no other company is in a position to offer an integrated suite of applications, and none has our track record of making customers successful and happy. As a result, we are well-positioned to become the favored system provider of choice for an entire industry. We nurture long-term relationships with our customers, leading to excellent financial stability for our company.

It's remarkable, if you think about it: companies all around the world that handle billions dollars worth of business a year trust us to manage their most critical business functions. These aren't lightweight peripheral systems – they are the core, mission-critical applications that the majority of employees use all day, every day. Guidewire was only founded in 2001, so how did we do this? How did we become a successful global company, winning these deals over our larger competitors, and how do we manage to deliver these complex applications to large and demanding customers?

We have a number of advantages:

• First, we had the good fortune to start Guidewire at a time when Silicon Valley was filled with the rubble of the great 2001 tech bust. We had 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 higher-quality products in less time. We get to spend more time writing software, and less time fixing bugs and dealing with customer issues. We continue to pioneer the use of these techniques at large scale, both internally in development, and out in the field at our customer sites. To give you a sense of the scale of our investment in this area, we now have on the order of 100,000 automated tests protecting the quality of our products.
• Third, we've developed an unbroken track record of successful implementation projects (because of a combination of solid product and skilled implementation). Since every implementation is a bet-the-company, bet-your-career decision for our customers, this track record is an invaluable competitive asset.
• Fourth, we apply unique technology that our competitors can't match: a highly customizable and upgradable metadata-driven 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. We are a sophisticated technology company bringing advanced approaches to an underserved industry.

The Guidewire team is very proud of the reputation we have earned in the industry. We take great pride in the products we build and the manner in which we operate as a company and on an individual level.

We live and operate by three basic principles. These are the same principles upon which Guidewire was founded and they remain at the heart of all we do today:

• We value integrity in everything that we do: truthful relationships with customers, prospective customers, partners, investors, and each other.
• We are dedicated to rationality: communicating through clear arguments, building excellent quality products, and making decisions carefully on the basis of factual evidence.
• We prize collegiality: working together as professional equals, with a minimum of hierarchy.

Click here for an extended look at Guidewire's Values and Practices. 

If you like what you see, come and talk to us. 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. But it's easy to say nice things on a website. We invite you to really find out the truth for yourself. Most of our job offers are accepted, so we're pretty confident that you'll like what you see! If you interview at Guidewire, we will treat you with respect and courtesy, and we will also attempt to create, in the interview, as realistic a work experience as possible. We want to learn about you, of course, but we also want you to see what it would be like to work with us.

If you like what you see, come and talk to us. 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. But it's easy to say nice things on a website. We invite you to really find out the truth for yourself. Most of our job offers are accepted, so we're pretty confident that you'll like what you see! If you interview at Guidewire, we will treat you with respect and courtesy, and we will also attempt to create, in the interview, as realistic a work experience as possible. We want to learn about you, of course, but we also want you to see what it would be like to work with us.