Product Lead

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Product Lead

Location: Ireland, UK, Spain or Portugal - Remote first

About Kota

Kota is the only broker that runs employee benefits for you. Combining health cover, pensions, protection, spend cards, and flexible perks with HRIS integrations, Kota replaces spreadsheets, manual admin, and once-a-year broker calls with one connected system - backed by a team of benefits experts behind every recommendation.

Kota powers benefits for more than 100,000 employees, across companies from fast-growing scale-ups to global HR and payroll platforms.

Investors include Eurazeo, EQT Ventures, Northzone, Frontline Ventures, 9Yards, and Plug and Play Ventures. The Kota team includes experts who previously led at global financial services firms and fintechs such as Airwallex, Stripe, Bolt, Revolut - as well as insurance and benefits providers such as Aviva, Allianz, AXA, and Smart Pension.

The Role

We're hiring a Product Lead to own a product area at Kota. You'll set the vision and strategy, make the calls on what gets built, and lead the engineers who build it. Product Leads managing their own engineers is unusual and it's deliberate: one person accountable for the product and the team shipping it.

You'll start in Insurances, which powers how employers offer and manage group cover: health, dental, vision, critical illness, life and income protection. It's our most complex area, and the work is turning underwriting and compliance rules into flows an employee can finish in minutes.

That won't be the whole of it. Our teams are loosely split between Insurances and Core/Finance, and people work across the problem set. As we add products and move into new countries the areas will change, so we want someone adaptable and opportunistic who'll own whichever part matters most as we grow. The remit is broad with little structure around it, so it suits a high ownership drive.

What You'll Do

• Own the vision and strategy for your area, and make the product calls on what gets built

• Lead and grow a group of product engineers, coaching them on scope and delivery decisions rather than assigning tickets

• Shape and lead 6-week cycles for new features and provider integrations

• Simplify insurer onboarding, plan setup, premium management and benefit workflows

• Translate compliance and underwriting complexity into flows people complete

• Work across the whole business. Support, success, sales and operations all have a stake in what you own

• Help shape what the product areas become as we add products and enter new markets

• Ship fast at a high quality bar, and hold the team to it

What We're Looking For

• Ideally product experience at lead, staff or principal level. If you are a strong senior product person and the rest lines up then this could work

• An entrepreneurial streak. You've founded something, worked at an early-stage startup, or spent time in engineering before moving into product

• You've owned the vision and strategy for an area, not just executed against someone else's

• Comfortable with fluid scope. You've picked up an unfamiliar domain before and become useful quickly

• Genuine AI fluency. You use AI tools daily in how you work, not just aware of them. We're an AI native company and this is part of the job, not a nice to have.

• Genuine cross-business collaboration. You've worked with support, success and sales, not only with engineers and designers with the occasional customer call

• You come from an environment with a high quality bar. It usually shows in the product itself

• Clear, concise communication, spoken and written, focused on value and outcomes rather than process

• Scale-up experience, roughly Series A to D. Seed-stage experience on top of that is a plus

• Comfortable managing people, or ready to start

• Domain experience. Fintech or Insurtech is the closest match to what you'll work on, then HR tech, benefits, employee expenses or travel. Anything sold to an employer that employees then use. The business model matters more than the industry label: if you've had to serve both an HR buyer and the employees using the product, that's the experience we care about

Not every box needs ticking. We'd rather see someone strong on several of these and light on others than someone who technically matches everything.

Our Hiring Process

We like to keep things simple and respectful of your time.

• Screening call (30 mins) with our talent team: your background, what you're looking for, and the practicalities

• Competency interview (30 mins) with one of our Product Leads, covering how you work, what you've owned and how you make product calls

• Task session (60 mins) with our GM and Product Lead, working through a real problem together

• Call with founders (30 mins) with our CEO and CTO: our vision, and your thoughts on it

Our Values

• Have Integrity. We care deeply about our why and it won’t jeopardise our how.

• Care Deeply. Our products are our story, we look at the details, go the extra mile to delight customers.

• Own Your Ship. Ask why, do the work, get the data, solve the problem, be an owner.

• Raise the Bar. We continuously look to push past good enough. Expect more, move faster, and never stop raising your and the team’s standards.

• Play to Win. We exist because we decided to say no to the norm – now we do this everyday.

Kota Benefits

• Attractive stock options to share in the success of Kota

• Health Insurance

• Life assurance (country dependent)

• Up to 5% matched contribution to a Workplace Pension (country dependent)

• WFH stipend to support your home office needs

We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.