Nikhil Agarwal, a Staff Software Engineer at Guidewire, has spent the last decade growing both personally and professionally. He celebrated his ten-year anniversary with the company in 2024, and his journey reflects the culture that defines Guidewire, a place that encourages people to grow, explore new ideas, and build impactful technology.
Nikhil is a familiar face to almost everyone in the India office, and he can often be found answering questions about Guidewire Cloud Platform or collaborating with his pod, Baga. At Guidewire, a pod refers to a cross-functional engineering team, and Nikhil’s pod is named after Baga Beach, a nod to his love for beaches.
He began his journey at Guidewire’s San Mateo office and after eight years of growth and contribution, he moved to the Bengaluru office in 2023 to continue his story.
Building Technology That Matters with Rating, Quoting, and PricingCenter
Over the years, Nikhil’s path has been guided by the meaningful technology he’s built. He’s worked on several projects that lie at the intersection of innovation and customer value, and one such project was Rating.
“Rating refers to the algorithm insurers use to calculate premiums,” he says. “It takes into account actuarial factors like asset cost, risk appetite, and more. But every insurance company approaches it differently, and that’s because every company has a different risk rating for their assets and coverages. This is why the insurance premiums vary from company to company. The complexity can drive anyone mad.”
To help address this, Nikhil and his team built the Rate Table Management platform, which enables insurers to develop and deploy their own rating algorithms, all while complying with government regulations across jurisdictions. “Our goal was to help customers configure and update their Rate Books quickly and to do it without a restart,” he says. “That platform stayed relevant for years, and I’m proud to have contributed to it.”
His next major milestone was Quoting Service, a project that tackles the heavy load of quoting transactions within a monolithic system. “Around 80% of the transactions are quotes,” he explains. “The load fluctuates constantly, and it’s very expensive and time-consuming to scale our monolithic system to handle it efficiently.”
To solve this, his team extracted the quoting functionality into a microservices-based framework, adopting a reactive architecture to improve scalability and resilience. “The Quoting Service scales way better. It can react to sudden fluctuations in load, and it reduces the load and dependency on a monolithic system. Microservices may not be the most talked about tech these days, but the patterns are still relevant,” he says.
A decade later, Nikhil’s excitement for shaping what’s next remains palpable. “I’m very excited about PricingCenter, our new product. It's a paradigm shift in how it seamlessly combines Rating with Pricing,” he adds.
It’s this forward momentum, led by people like him, that keeps innovation thriving at Guidewire.
The Culture That Powers Guidewire
When he joined Guidewire in December 2014, life looked very different for Nikhil. A decade later, he is a father of two children, both of whom have grown up alongside his journey here. “It’s impossible to separate my personal growth from my time at the company,” he says. “There are always elements of culture and learning from your colleagues that eventually bleed into your personal life.” In this way and many others, his story is closely entwined with the story of Guidewire itself. He’s witnessed the conception of countless ideas, the evolution of products, and the transformation of teams.
Throughout it all, the company’s culture has always been Nikhil’s anchor. “Rationality, integrity, and collegiality are deeply ingrained in how we work,” he says. Having experienced both the San Mateo and Bengaluru offices, he’s seen these values remain consistent, even as the company evolved.
The recent move to the new Bengaluru office captures that spirit perfectly. “I’m renovating my home too, so I feel like I can comment like an expert,” he jokes. “It’s a beautiful office, but it’s also so much more than that. Every space was designed very intentionally. The art, the finishes, the colors. It's a perfect blend of Japandi modernism, mid-century styling, and Indian heritage.”
Leading with Openness
As his career progressed, Nikhil also took on leadership and mentoring responsibilities, something he now sees as one of the most fulfilling parts of his journey. “Moving from being an individual contributor to leading others wasn’t easy. I was a strong contributor and had a great rapport with everyone, but leadership required a different Nikhil,” he says. “I grew into the role and eventually discovered what kind of leader I wanted to be.”
Nikhil believes in the principles of the vulnerable leader. “It’s all about trust, honesty and maturity,“ he says. “Admitting that I messed up creates psychological safety and signals to the team that they can take risks.” He also encourages his team to think independently, as he believes it to be critical for innovation.
Nikhil is also deeply engaged in exploring gen AI with his team, but with a grounded perspective. “Gen AI has huge potential for productivity, from coding to documentation,” he says. “But in critical systems like insurance, accuracy is everything. That’s why I see AI as a co-pilot, not the pilot. It should enhance our judgment, not replace it.”
With all the hype and excitement around gen AI, one wonders if ROI will be commensurate to the investment. “We’re hyper aware of the risks. We have a lot of debates about LLMs, both technologically and philosophically. I’d like to think we’re investing very carefully and thoughtfully, especially on the agentic AI project that I’m working on. But more on that later," he hints.
Nikhil’s decade at Guidewire is a story of steady growth, technical excellence, and a culture that values people as much as progress. “In an industry where moving between jobs is common, I’ve stayed because I’ve never found another company with the same culture, people, and impactful mission as Guidewire,” he says. “For me, it’s more than just building software. It’s the people, the work we do together, and the feeling like I truly belong here.”
Photo - Nikhil Agarwal (far left) with his team at Guidewire Bengaluru’s new office opening.