Guidewire Developer Job Description Template 2026

Last updated: September 26, 2026

By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1

A Guidewire developer job description should name the application and the Guidewire Cloud release or self-managed version your team runs, list the Gosu, PCF, and integration work the developer owns, and state where business analyst work stops. Add a sentence on AI coding tools and a real pay range. Most postings do none of that. The good candidates notice.

Try something with the last Guidewire posting your team ran. Cross out the company name. Then ask whether any other carrier in the country could publish the rest of it unchanged.

Usually they could.

I read a lot of these, because carriers send them over before a search starts, and the same handful of bullets shows up so often I could recite them from memory. “Configure and customize Guidewire InsuranceSuite applications.” “Strong knowledge of Gosu and Java.” “Experience with Guidewire integrations.” “Work with business analysts to gather requirements.” “Guidewire 10.x or Cloud experience a plus.” None of it is wrong. None of it says anything, either, and the engineers you actually want can tell in about four seconds that whoever wrote it has never opened the codebase.

That matters more on this platform than on most. A Guidewire developer’s career mostly runs inside one vendor’s ecosystem, so they know exactly which questions separate a real seat from a vague one. Which application? Cloud or self-managed, and which release? Who writes the stories? Can they use the AI assistants Guidewire shipped in August? Fair questions, all four. A posting that answers those on the first screen gets read by people who have done the work, while one that skips them collects applicants who matched a keyword and very little else.

Full disclosure, since you’re reading this on a staffing firm’s site. KORE1 gets paid when a carrier hires someone we found. Nothing below requires hiring us. Plenty of carriers fix their own postings with it, and when they don’t have the time, our insurance IT staffing recruiters do this rewrite as step one of every Guidewire search.

Six Bullets That Could Belong to Any Carrier

Below are the usual lines, what a working Guidewire engineer can’t learn from them, and what we’d put there instead. Yes, the rewrites are narrow. Deliberately. An engineer with five years of ClaimCenter assignment rules behind them gets nothing from “configure and customize,” and gets nearly everything from the name of the rules they’d be inheriting.

Read down the right-hand column and every line names something a person would own.

Not a skill. Skills are what duty lists drift toward, because they copy cleanly from the last posting. Ownership doesn’t copy. It takes twenty minutes with the engineering manager, and sometimes those twenty minutes turn up something awkward, like a billing integration nobody has owned since the contractor who built it left. Good. Better to hear that now than from a candidate on a first call, where “we’re not sure” sounds a lot worse than it does in a planning meeting.

Where the Business Analyst’s Work Ends

This is the mistake I see most. It also costs the most applicants.

Guidewire programs split work between developers and business analysts more sharply than most enterprise platforms do. A lot of what a carrier calls “configuring Guidewire” isn’t code. Designing a product, with its coverages, terms, and the questions an agent answers at quote time, happens in Guidewire’s Advanced Product Designer, which Guidewire says produces “auto-generated artifacts, including UI elements, product model, and entities ready to install.” At many carriers, rate table updates after a filing belong to a BA or a rating analyst as well. Requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and the long sessions with underwriting or claims that produce them are BA work, full stop.

The developer starts where the generated code stops. Gosu rules and plugins. PCF screens that need more than the generator gives you. Integrations, batch processes, performance problems, the build.

Postings blur that line all the time. A Florida homeowners carrier in Jacksonville sent us a “Guidewire Developer” req last year with nine bullets, and four of them were analyst duties: gather requirements from underwriting, maintain the product model in APD, update rate tables for filed changes, write stories with acceptance criteria. It pulled 112 applicants. About 40 were business analysts, who had read it correctly. The posting’s fault, not theirs. The developers who applied all asked the same thing on the first call, which was who writes the stories, and the honest answer turned out to be that the carrier expected one person to do both jobs while also moving a wind deductible endorsement, hand-coded in Gosu years earlier, into APD.

We split it. The developer posting lost the four analyst bullets and gained two sentences about the hurricane deductible rules the new hire would inherit. The other half went to our business analyst staffing team as its own req, written for someone who lives in APD and the underwriting meetings. Both seats filled. Neither person has had to cover for the other since.

Guidewire’s own tooling now draws the line in the same place. The August Qusar release shipped one set of AI assistants for developers working in Gosu, integrations, and Jutro, and a separate Product Design Assistant, still in early access, for the people working in APD. Two jobs. Two tools.

Smaller carriers and MGAs sometimes genuinely need a hybrid. Fine. Put both words in the title, say roughly how the week splits, and don’t pretend it’s a pure developer seat. If you’re writing the analyst version, our business analyst job description template covers that side, and the Guidewire lines drop straight into it.

Put the Release Name in the Posting

Guidewire Cloud doesn’t label releases the way the old self-managed versions did. It uses ski resorts. Three a year now, roughly four months apart, and the names run in alphabetical order.

Source: Guidewire’s cloud platform release page.

To a Guidewire engineer, those names are version numbers. “Palisades” tells them which Cloud APIs they’ll have, what the build tooling looks like, and roughly how far behind current the carrier sits. “Guidewire Cloud” with no release tells them less. And a posting that still says “Guidewire 10.x” after the carrier moved to Cloud tells them something false. Worse than nothing.

That last one happened this summer. A specialty commercial auto carrier in Richmond, Virginia, reopened a ClaimCenter req by cloning its 2022 posting, written back when the whole suite was self-managed. Nobody caught it. The applicants skewed heavily toward engineers who had spent their careers on self-managed installs, and when we called a Cloud engineer we’d placed in Richmond a few years back, the first thing they said was that they’d seen the posting and skipped it, assuming the codebase was still on-prem. The fix? One line. “ClaimCenter on Guidewire Cloud, currently on Palisades, with the Qusar upgrade planned for early 2027.”

Self-managed carriers should be just as exact. Give the version and patch level. If a move to Cloud is approved and funded, say so, because candidates weigh it heavily and it’s a perfectly fair thing to tell them. If it isn’t, say that too. Honest beats hopeful. Screening candidates for that experience is its own step, which our guide to hiring a Guidewire developer walks through.

Say Where You Stand on the AI Assistants

On August 3, Guidewire announced its Qusar release, and with it Developer Assistants for Gosu, integrations, and Jutro, now generally available. They connect to the coding tools developers already use through the Model Context Protocol, and Guidewire’s developer blog on the assistants names Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, and Amazon Kiro. The same post describes an internal test. Guidewire ran one AI coding tool through 33 Gosu tasks twice, once with the Gosu assistant connected and once without. Without it, the tool failed all 33. With it, the tool passed all 33 and finished 41% faster.

That’s a vendor measuring its own product. Weigh it accordingly.

The question it raises for hiring is real, though, and it’s already showing up on first calls. A regional workers’ comp carrier in Kansas City found this out in August, when a senior integration developer in its final round asked whether the team could use the Guidewire assistant through Cursor. The hiring manager didn’t know. Security, it turned out, still had a 2024 memo on file banning AI coding tools outright, because nobody had revisited it after an early pilot ended, so the answer on paper was no and the answer in practice was that two of the existing developers used Copilot anyway. Awkward all around. The candidate took an offer from a carrier whose posting had a short paragraph on exactly this.

You don’t need a paragraph. Two sentences will do. Say which tools are approved and how they connect, whether AI-assisted Gosu goes through the same pull request review and GUnit coverage as everything else, and whether any part of the codebase is off-limits. Some carriers keep rating logic tied to filed rates out of scope, for instance, so every change traces back to a person.

The answer can be no. No is fine. Silence is what hurts you, because in 2026 a candidate reads silence as a sign that nobody has thought about it, and they wonder what else nobody has thought about.

Guidewire Developer Job Description Template

Each set of square brackets below is a blank your team fills in. Parenthetical notes are guidance, and they come out before publishing. If a blank stumps you, the engineer who runs your Guidewire builds can usually fill it in five minutes, and a serious candidate will expect that answer either way.

Job Title

[Guidewire ClaimCenter Developer / Guidewire PolicyCenter Configuration Developer / Guidewire Integration Developer, Integration Gateway and Cloud API / Senior Guidewire BillingCenter Developer] (Name the application. “Guidewire Developer” alone pulls every Guidewire resume in the country, analysts and testers included. Keep the word Guidewire so searches still find it.)

About the Role

[Company] writes [lines of business, such as homeowners and dwelling fire in Florida and Georgia / commercial auto in 14 states], and this developer joins a team of [N] that owns [ClaimCenter / PolicyCenter / the integrations around both]. You’ll report to [role], and day to day you’ll sit closest to [our Guidewire business analysts / the claims operations team / the data engineers who consume our App Events].

Your Guidewire Environment

• [PolicyCenter / ClaimCenter / BillingCenter] on [Guidewire Cloud, (release name, such as Palisades) / a self-managed (version and patch level) install]
• [Next upgrade: (release name) planned for (quarter) / no upgrade scheduled this year / Cloud migration funded for (year)]
• Builds and deployments through [Guidewire Cloud Console and TeamCity / (your CI tool)], with about [N] production releases a [month / quarter]
• Integrations through [Integration Gateway and Apache Camel / App Events / Cloud API / older messaging plugins], connected to [named systems: payments vendor, document platform, data warehouse]
• Screens in [PCF / Jutro for the (agent or customer) portal / both]
• Development in Guidewire Studio, with unit tests in GUnit [and automated regression in (tool)]
• Product design in [Advanced Product Designer, owned by our BA team / not in use yet]

What You’ll Own

• [Named area: the FNOL intake flow and assignment rules in ClaimCenter / the commercial auto quote flow in PolicyCenter / outbound integrations to (vendor)] from design through production
• Gosu rules, plugins, and batch processes for [area], along with the tests that go with them
• PCF changes beyond what [APD generates / our BAs configure], [plus Jutro components if the portal is in scope]
• Technical design for stories our BAs write. You’ll push back on them. You won’t write them. (Delete this line only if the seat really is a combined developer and analyst role, and say so in the title.)
• [Upgrade seats: roughly (X) percent of your time on the (release name) upgrade, including retesting custom rules and integrations]
• [Production support rotation: (N) weeks a year / weekday hours only / no rotation]

What You Bring

• [Three / five / eight] or more years of Guidewire development, including at least [one / two] in [the application named above]
• Gosu you’ve shipped to production, and enough Java to read the platform code underneath it
• [Integration seats: Apache Camel routes, REST APIs, and event-driven integration, ideally through Integration Gateway and App Events]
• [Cloud seats: day-to-day work in Guidewire Cloud Console, including builds, quality gates, and promotions between planets]
• Current Guidewire certification, Associate or Ace, for the release you run [or a plan to earn it within (N) months]
• A production defect in code you wrote, and what you changed about how you work afterward. (Keep this one. People answer it more honestly than you’d expect.)

Nice to Have

• Time in [line of business] (Keep this only if the domain takes months to learn. Florida wind deductibles do. Plain personal auto usually doesn’t.)
• Jutro experience [if a portal is in scope this year]
• Work with [Guidewire Data Platform / Snowflake / your warehouse] for seats that feed reporting

AI Coding Tools on This Team

[We use Guidewire’s Developer Assistants for (Gosu / Integrations / Jutro) through (Copilot / Cursor / Claude Code), and AI-assisted code gets the same pull request review and GUnit coverage as everything else. / We’re evaluating AI coding tools and expect a decision by (quarter). Until then, (policy). / We don’t allow AI coding tools on this codebase, because (reason).] (Pick one. Two sentences, no more.)

Compensation and Location

Base pay: [$low] to [$high]. Bonus: [target of (N) percent / none]. Benefits: [the three or four that matter most to your team]. Location: [fully remote within the U.S. / hybrid, (N) days a week at our (city) office / on site in (city)]. [Contract seats: ($low) to ($high) an hour, (W-2 / corp-to-corp).] (Post the real range. Several states require it, and experienced Guidewire developers skip postings that leave it out.)

Things Carriers Ask Us About Guidewire Postings

What does a Guidewire developer build, week to week?

A Guidewire developer mostly writes and changes Gosu rules, PCF screens, and integration code inside one Guidewire application, then tests and deploys those changes through the carrier’s build pipeline.

The mix depends on the seat. A ClaimCenter configuration developer’s week is rules and screens. An integration developer barely touches the UI and spends the week on Camel routes, events, and whichever vendor API broke on Tuesday. Very different jobs, same title, which is the whole reason the title line in the template names the application.

Is Gosu close enough to Java that a strong Java developer can take the seat?

Close, but not close enough for a senior seat, because Gosu’s syntax takes days to learn while Guidewire’s data model, rules engine, and PCF framework take months of real project time.

Guidewire describes Gosu as Java-compatible. It compiles to JVM bytecode, which is why a Java engineer picks up the syntax fast. A junior seat with a patient team can absolutely take a Java developer and train them. Senior seats usually can’t wait. The Gosu and rules depth is exactly what our Guidewire interview question set is built to test. If you’re hiring the Java engineers who build the services around Guidewire rather than inside it, our Java developer job description template fits that seat better.

Where exactly does the BA’s job stop and the developer’s start?

Roughly at the generated code, since the BA defines products, coverages, and requirements in APD and in stories, and the developer owns the Gosu, PCF, and integrations that make those definitions work.

Rate tables are the fuzzy middle. At some carriers a rating analyst owns them entirely. At others a developer does, because an old customization moved rating logic into Gosu years ago. Find out which one you are before the posting goes up.

Nobody outside Guidewire knows what Palisades means. Do we really need to name our release?

Name it, because every Guidewire Cloud engineer reads a release name like Palisades as a version number, and they’re the only readers the posting has to impress.

The release name tells them what’s in the platform and how current you keep it. Leave it out and they assume the worst. Some of them will be right.

Should a Guidewire posting mention AI coding assistants at all?

One or two sentences, yes, covering which tools are approved, how AI-assisted code gets reviewed, and whether any code is off-limits, because senior candidates now ask on the first call.

It’s a new line for most carriers. Guidewire’s Developer Assistants only went generally available with Qusar in August 2026, and plenty of security teams haven’t written a policy yet. “We’re deciding by the end of the first quarter” is an honest answer and a perfectly good one.

What pay range should go on a Guidewire developer posting?

$135,980 was the median annual wage for all U.S. software developers in May 2025, per the BLS, and that figure doesn’t separate Guidewire skills from any other stack, so set your range from current market data for the seat.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics number is context, not a benchmark. On the contract side, our insurance IT team puts contract bill rates for senior Guidewire and Duck Creek developers at roughly $115 to $165 per hour in 2026. Salaried seats differ. Our Guidewire salary guide lays out the full pay bands by level. For a range tied to your own metro, check your numbers in our salary benchmark tool or ask us.

The Swap Test, One More Time

Go back to the test from the top. Cross out your company name again. If the posting now names your application and release, lists the rules and integrations the person will own, says where the BA stops, takes a position on AI tools, and shows real pay, no other carrier could publish it. That’s the point. A Guidewire engineer reading it knows that somebody who has actually seen the code wrote it.

We fill Guidewire seats on contract and as direct hires, and we’ve been recruiting engineers since 2005. Two kinds of search, usually. Upgrade and release work runs through our Guidewire contract and staff augmentation team. Permanent seats go to the recruiters who staff the carrier’s own Guidewire team, and Chicago-area searches run through our Guidewire team for Chicagoland carriers. Twelve months after a start date, 92% of our placements are still with the client that hired them. I’d give some of the credit to postings like the ones above. In my experience, people who knew exactly what they were walking into stick around, and the posting is usually where they found out.

If there’s a Guidewire req sitting in draft right now, share it with our recruiters with the release name written at the top. It comes back with our red ink on it, usually within a day.