Operations Manager (Life, Health & 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. Manage a team of four specialists: distribute workload, monitor capacity through peak periods, and support the team's development. You will own team performance and be accountable for output quality.

• Own error and issue management. You are the front line when things go wrong. Escalated customer queries, provider errors, recurring issues in the system - these land with you. You investigate, resolve, and make sure the same problem does not happen twice.

• Drive process improvement and automation. Map existing workflows, identify where they break, and work with product, engineering, and integrations to fix them. We use AI tools extensively and expect this person to be curious about what can be automated.

• Oversee new business administration. Set up new employer schemes, facilitate application processing between employers, employees, and insurance providers, and keep CRM and internal systems accurate.

• Support scheme renewals and policy event administration. Process policy changes - joiners, leavers, dependants, amendments - across the full provider landscape, coordinating with insurers and internal teams.

• Act as a first line of investigation for support queries. BenOps sits inside our support function. You and the team handle benefit and policy-related queries from customers, own issue resolution, and liaise with providers on escalations. Intercom, Slack workflows, and Asana are daily tools.

• Partner across the business. Work closely with integrations, sales, other teams operations, and customer success on new product launches, expansions, and provider relationships.

• Lead strategic projects. Identify and drive business-critical initiatives that will accelerate BenOps capability - whether that is a process rebuild, a new provider integration, or a compliance improvement.

What we are looking for

• Qualified It is essential that you are minimum APA qualified in Pension, Health and Life insurance. Ideally you have achieved QFA status

• Management experience You have led a team before, even a small one. You know how to distribute work, give feedback, and maintain quality under pressure.

• Industry background You have worked in a broker, insurance provider, pension provider, or fintech handling complex benefit products. You know how the provider landscape works and how to get things done within it.

• Operational depth You have managed multiple complex workstreams at once, built or improved processes, and kept quality high in a fast-moving environment.

• Customer-first You are comfortable with a role that has a support component. When a customer has a problem, you treat it as your problem until it is resolved.

• AI-curious. We use AI tools daily at Kota and expect everyone to engage with them. You do not need to be technical, but you should be genuinely interested in working more efficiently.

• Comfortable with ambiguity. Things change. Processes are still being built. That energises you rather than frustrates you.

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. We care deeply about our why and will not jeopardise our how.

• Care Deeply. Our products are our story - we look at the 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. We 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.