Strategy & Operations Manager

Job description

**Reporting to**: COO **Location**: Dublin - 2 days on site **About Kota** Kota is reimagining insurance and retirement benefits for the modern workforce. Through our two flagship products - Kota Platform, the first fully integrated benefits platform, and Kota Embed, our embedded insurance solution - we're making benefits more accessible, valued, and global. Today, we power benefits for tens of thousands of employees at Europe's most forward-thinking companies, including Carwow, Tines, Zoe, and Remote. Founded in 2022, we've raised more than €20M from leading investors like EQT Ventures, Eurazeo, Northzone, and Frontline, along with founders and executives from Workday, Remote, Personio, OpenAI, and more. **The Role** We are building out our foundational Strategy team, which will play a crucial role as we scale the business in 2026 and 2027. Reporting to the COO, this person will take on a wide range of responsibilities to support many different areas of Kota. **The initial focus will be on shaping the end-to-end customer experience and working cross functionally to ensure we deliver great outcomes for our customers.** Success in this role would lead to this person becoming a trusted problem solver in the company with broad knowledge of the business and its operations. This individual should be a generalist and an excellent problem solver, enjoying the ambiguity that is inherent in startup life. The role represents an opportunity to build, supported by experienced founders and a stellar executive team, leading to senior leadership exposure and accelerated learning. **What You'll do** - Drive strategic projects. Identify and lead business-critical projects that will accelerate business growth and improve efficiency, particularly in areas such as customer experience and expansion - Lead day-to-day initiatives to uplift the performance of our functional teams, taking ownership for element of our BAU setup - Own competitive intelligence. Build our market understanding and contribute to the development of industry-leading solutions that solve pain points experienced by customers. - Establish data foundations. Contribute to a data-centric culture by owning projects that drive our information capabilities, enabling everyone to take a data-driven approach to problem-solving. - Prepare cross-functional updates. Draft and update materials informing stakeholders about project progress, risks, and opportunities. - Handle ad-hoc requests relating to all functional areas of the business, including deep dives or issue analysis and resolution **What We're Looking For** - 5+ years of experience in fast-growing startups or top-tier consulting firms or equivalent - Outstanding analytical skills across tools, with SQL experience preferred - Ability to switch contexts. We are looking for a generalist who can quickly learn and operate across various, complex topics at any one time - Bias for action. You prefer to drive things to completion and achieve results - Customer-first mindset. Our customers are at the heart of what we do and everything we build contributes to industry-leading outcomes for them - Clear communication. Excellent written and verbal skills. You can communicate ideas clearly and engage stakeholders at all levels - Comfort with ambiguity. You thrive when there's no playbook. You'd rather build the thing than inherit the thing. **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** - Health Insurance via Kota with a generous allowance - Workplace Pension with matched contributions up to 5% via Kota (country dependent) - WFH stipend to support your home office setup - 25 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) - Annual company-wide offsite + dedicated team offsite - Attractive stock options for all employees