Lead Application Support Engineer, Tech Lead

Summary

Are you passionate about customer success? Do you like digging into code, and have a drive to continuously learn and solve problems? Do you want to be part of a global team that provides the best customer service in the industry, especially the customers in Japan? If so, come join us at Guidewire!
Guidewire is seeking a proactive and solution-driven Lead Application Support Engineer to join our dynamic Application Support team at our Tokyo office. The successful candidate will be part of the Product Development Operations (PDO) organization working in a hybrid environment that delivers 24x7 service to customers who are using Guidewire software both in the Guidewire Cloud and on-premise.
As a Lead Application Support Engineer, you will learn everything there is to know about Guidewire’s products, and you will communicate and share that knowledge with Guidewire’s internal and external customers, including our Japanese customers. Join us and enjoy a career where you can make an impact. You will be inspired by those around you, and you’ll be trusted and empowered to go further.

Job Description

A Lead Application Support Engineer is primarily responsible for providing technical support to Guidewire customers using Guidewire products.

• Develop and maintain deep expertise in Guidewire’s suite of products.

• Troubleshooting and resolution of complex cases independently. This includes identifying root causes of issues, providing workarounds or solutions, and collaborating with other teams to resolve complex problems.

• Manage and resolve incidents within contractual service level agreements (SLAs). This includes Provide daily coordination and guidance to the team for processing incoming cases to ensure courteous, timely, high quality, and effective responses to customer issues..

• Communicate with customers and ensure that they receive timely and accurate updates on the status of their support requests. This includes providing clear and concise technical explanations to non-technical customers, and managing customer expectations.

• Prioritizing and escalating customer issues appropriately with clear context, impact summaries, and recommended next steps.

• Perform case audits and provide coaching to improve customer communication and case hygiene.

• Create and maintain knowledge articles related to the resolution of customer-reported problems with Guidewire products. Define and maintain diagnostic playbooks/runbooks.

• Execute operational tasks to provision, rebuild, configure, and restore services for customer cloud environments as needed.

• Identify areas for service improvement, and collaborate with other teams to implement changes that improve the customer experience. Lead medium-sized projects and initiatives from scoping through delivery.

• Elevate team understanding of products, tooling, and best practices through day-to-day work and structured knowledge sharing. Mentor peers and junior engineers to build technical skills, judgment, and autonomy.

• Participate in interviews and selection of candidates. Train and enable new hires.

• As part of a global team, we provide 24x7 support using a Follow-the-Sun model across our three regions (APAC, EMEA and AMER). You will enjoy local daytime working hours Monday-Friday while participating in occasional weekend shifts on a rotating basis to cover production emergencies.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• 10+ years of work experience providing enterprise application software support in Java for a B2B software company. Strong proficiency in Guidewire products on Guidewire Cloud Platform is preferred.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English and Japanese, including the ability to explain complex technical topics in clear, customer-friendly language.

• Experienced in handling high severity and complex issues impacting production systems availability.

• Advanced exposure to broad technical skills including Java, Spring Boot and microservices architecture. Strong experience handling enterprise integration protocols, including RESTful APIs, SOAP Web Services.. Familiar with front-end web technologies (JavaScript / ReactJS or similar).

• Proficient in troubleshooting performance issues in distributed environments. Experienced in using various troubleshooting tools like : Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics.

• Competent in reading the stack traces and reviewing the application code. Experienced in reading and interpreting application server thread dumps, Oracle AWR reports, and other log files.

• Strong understanding of relational databases and SQL, preferably Postgres, Oracle and SQL Server.

• Experienced in documenting technical solutions (preferably in the form of knowledge base articles).

• Proven experience mentoring or coaching peers and contributing to team-wide enablement or documentation.

• Experienced in collaborating with cross-functional teams (Dev, Cloud, Platform, Infosec, etc…)

• Supported managers and leads on improving processes and team efficiency. Proactively look for ways to improve uptime, alerting, and efficiencies of systems.
  

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

• Outstanding troubleshooting skills; ability to think critically and display an aptitude for problem solving

• Employ sound business judgment when making business decisions

• Use creative and innovative ways to solve problems

• Display a strong work ethic and do whatever it takes to get the job done

• Demonstrate strong follow-through and consistently keep commitments to customers and employees

• Display an understanding of the customer’s needs and a strong commitment to customer satisfaction

• Ensure that each and every customer is handled with a consummately professional attitude and the highest possible level of service

About Guidewire

Guidewire is the platform P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. We combine digital, core, analytics, and AI to deliver our platform as a cloud service. More than 540+ insurers in 40 countries, from new ventures to the largest and most complex in the world, run on Guidewire.

As a partner to our customers, we continually evolve to enable their success. We are proud of our unparalleled implementation track record with 1600+ successful projects, supported by the largest R&D team and partner ecosystem in the industry. Our Marketplace provides hundreds of applications that accelerate integration, localization, and innovation.

For more information, please visit www.guidewire.com and follow us on Twitter: @Guidewire_PandC.

Guidewire Software, Inc. is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We are committed to an inclusive workplace, and believe that a diversity of perspectives, abilities, and cultures is a key to our success. Qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship, marital status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or disability. All offers are contingent upon passing a criminal history and other background checks where it's applicable to the position.