Zurich Insurance

Our opportunity

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 several GW related projects.

Your main responsibilities will involve:

• In partnership with Zurich’s Group Claims organization, 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: 

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:
• Java 8 (or higher) Programming (essential)
• Web Services (SOAP and RESTful)
• SQL queries and database access tools.
• XML technologies (XSD, XPath, XQuery, XSL, and XSLT).
• Relational databases
• Version control systems
• 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:
• Linux tools and CLI
• Distributed source code management tools - ideally Git and Bitbucket.
• CI tools such as Jenkins
• Atlassian Suite E.g. Jira
• Test automation tools such as SOAPUI and Selenium IDE/WebDriver
• Python
• 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

As well as a competitive salary and a yearly bonus we offer benefits package which includes:

• Option to work remotely within Spain even up to 100% - you choose
• Flexible working hours
• Wide range of internal and external trainings
• Free English, German and Spanish classes depending on the needs
• Ticket restaurant
• Life Insurance
• Collective Life Retirement Plan - after 1 year in the company
• Referral bonus if you bring other talented people like you
• Special banking and insurance conditions
• Exclusive Employees discounts

#LI-Hybrid

Primary work location is Barcelona, Poblenou. Please apply with your CV in English by clicking on the button “Apply online”.

Who we are

Looking for a challenging and inspiring work environment where you can make a difference? At Zurich millions of individuals and businesses place their trust in our products and services every day. Our 53,000 employees worldwide form the basis of our success, enabling, businesses and communities to face a world of risk with confidence. Imagine if you could help people do this all over the world. You’d give them confidence and reassurance by protecting what they love most. It’s a big challenge, but you will be supported by a world-class team who believe in helping you to reach your full potential and deliver on our promises.

Diversity & Inclusion

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.

So be challenged. Be inspired. Help us make a difference.

You are the heart & soul of Zurich! 

At Zurich, we like to think outside the box and challenge the status quo. We take an optimistic approach by focusing on the positives and constantly asking What can go right? 

We highly value the experience and know-how of our employees and offer a wide range of opportunities across business areas to encourage you to apply for new opportunities within Zurich when you are ready for your next career step. 

Let’s continue to grow together!

• Location(s): ES - Barcelona 
• Remote working: Yes
• Schedule: Full Time
• Recruiter name: Alvaro Gallego Zazo