Operations Manager (Insurance & Pensions)

Location: Dublin or London | Hybrid (2 days on-site per week)

Type: Fixed-term contract, 12 months initially

Reports to: COO

About Kota

Kota is reimagining insurance and retirement benefits for the modern workforce. Through two flagship products - Kota Platform, the first fully integrated benefits platform, and Kota Embed, our embedded insurance solution - we make benefits more accessible, more valued, and genuinely global. We power benefits for tens of thousands of employees at some of Europe's most forward-thinking companies, including Carwow, Tines, Zoe, and Remote. Founded in 2022, we have raised over €20M from leading investors including EQT Ventures, Eurazeo, Northzone, and Frontline, alongside founders and executives from Workday, Remote, Personio, OpenAI, and others.

The role

Benefit Operations (known internally as BenOps) is the largest operational team in Kota. We sit at the intersection of customer experience, provider relationships, and product delivery - making sure that everything we promise actually happens. This is a management role leading a team of four. You will spend roughly half your time on strategy and improvement: redesigning how BenOps works, identifying automation opportunities, and partnering with product and engineering to build better processes. The remaining time is split between managing and developing the team, and staying close enough to complex cases to know when something is going wrong before it escalates. This is not a pure execution role. We need someone who can hold a team together, drive change at pace, and still roll up their sleeves on a complex provider query or customer escalation when it matters. You will have high visibility with the COO and broader leadership team, and real scope to shape how BenOps functions long-term - with the potential for this role to convert to a permanent position.

What You Will Do

• Lead and manage the BenOps team, distributing workload, monitoring capacity through peak periods, and supporting the team's development.
• Own team performance and be accountable for output quality.
• Own error and issue management – the front line when things go wrong, investigating, resolving, and preventing recurrence.
• Drive process improvement and automation – mapping existing workflows, identifying breakdowns, and working with product, engineering, and integrations to fix them.
• Oversee new business administration: setting up new employer schemes, facilitating application processing between employers, employees, and insurance providers, and keeping CRM and internal systems accurate.
• Support scheme renewals and policy event administration, processing policy changes across the full provider landscape and coordinating with insurers and internal teams.
• Act as a first line of investigation for support queries – handling benefit and policy-related queries from customers, resolving issues, and liaising with providers on escalations.
• Partner across the business, working closely with integrations, sales, other operations teams, and customer success on new product launches, expansions, and provider relationships.
• Lead strategic projects, identifying and driving business-critical initiatives that accelerate BenOps capability.

What we are looking for

• Qualified – minimum APA qualified in Pension, Health and Life insurance; ideally achieved QFA status.
• Management experience – led a team before, distributing work, giving feedback, and maintaining quality under pressure.
• Industry background – worked in a broker, insurance provider, pension provider, or fintech handling complex benefit products.
• Operational depth – managed multiple complex workstreams, built or improved processes, and kept quality high in a fast-moving environment.
• Customer-first – comfortable with a support component, treating customer problems as your own until resolved.
• AI-curious – daily use of AI tools at Kota; genuine interest in working more efficiently.
• Comfortable with ambiguity – thrives when processes are still being built.

This is a particularly good fit if

• You have worked somewhere fast-moving and have had to build or rebuild processes under pressure.
• You are a manager who is still comfortable doing the work yourself when the situation demands it.
• You want senior leadership exposure at a fintech in a growth stage, and you are open to a 12-month commitment that could become something longer.

Our values

• Have Integrity – care deeply about our why and will not jeopardise our how.
• Care Deeply – our products are our story; we look at details and go the extra mile for customers.
• Own Your Ship – ask why, do the work, get the data, solve the problem, be an owner.
• Raise the Bar – continuously push past good enough. Expect more, move faster, never stop raising standards.
• Play to Win – we exist because we said no to the norm; we do this every day.