Insurance Systems
Over ten years in insurance IT, primarily with Guidewire BillingCenter — the part of the system that handles how insurers charge, collect, and reconcile money. Over time the work shifted from implementation to architecture: designing systems, leading migrations, assessing risk, and building the teams that deliver.
What I Do
Most of my work sits at the intersection of system architecture, delivery leadership, and organisational change.
On the architecture side: end-to-end billing workflow design, corporate invoicing, integrations between BillingCenter and surrounding systems. At CGI I led the architectural analysis for new product billing and a cloud migration risk assessment — the kind of work where a wrong early decision costs years.
On the delivery side: I have run teams as both lead programmer and Scrum Master — from standing up a new development team from scratch to mentoring developers and running upgrade projects across multiple client environments.
Migration projects always have a human component. Moving from v9 to v10 or from on-premise to cloud is never just a technical problem.
How I Got Here
Started at Generali Finance in 2015 as a PL/SQL programmer on the INSIS insurance system — database implementation, payments, underwriting. Solid foundation in how insurance data works at the lowest level.
From there, nearly seven years at Sollers Consulting — from Senior Developer to IT Designer. Early years: Guidewire billing and motor systems for German and British clients, legacy integrations, migration environments. Later years: architecture, cross-system enhancements, project lifecycles, mentoring, recruiting.
Since 2023 at CGI as Guidewire BillingCenter Architect — cross-center architectural analysis, cloud migration, team leadership at programme level.
Stack & Certifications
Core
- Guidewire: BillingCenter, PolicyCenter, InsuranceSuite — configuration, integration, upgrade
- Languages: Gosu, Java, PL/SQL, SQL, Python
- Databases: Oracle, MS SQL
- Integration & CI: Jenkins, Git, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket
In the age of AI agents the barrier to entry for any technology stack has dropped. I'm currently testing GitHub Copilot — Guidewire's official AI tool — and configuring Anthropic Claude for large Gosu codebases and InsuranceSuite repositories. What matters most is still getting the architecture right — the stack choice follows naturally from weighing the trade-offs. One constant remains: version control. Git, clean project structure, discipline around how code is organised and tracked.
Guidewire certifications
- ACE — BillingCenter Configuration (Niseko)
- Associate — InsuranceSuite Developer (Niseko)
- Specialist — InsuranceSuite 10.0 Integration
- Policy Center Configuration 9.0
Other
- Professional Scrum Master 1.0 — scrum.org
- MBA — Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, 2020
Work With Me
Scoping a Guidewire programme, planning a migration, or building a BillingCenter team? Happy to talk.
Email: JakubKoladaDev@gmail.com
LinkedIn: Jakub Kolada
NIP: 9512416493