The short version
This is the first insurance operations hire at Althea: one person who owns the chain between the quote and the claim, and who designs it as much as runs it.
You are likely a fit if you spent the last decade inside technology-first insurance, ideally as an early employee who built an operation rather than inheriting one, with your center of gravity in claims and operations rather than underwriting. You think in whole systems and would rather fix one than staff it. Deep underwriting credentials are welcome but not the bar; running claims under real catastrophe loss is.
The problem
An insurance thesis becomes a company at the moment a policy is bound. Everything before that — the model, the FORTIFIED™ gate, the quote — is a claim about how a home will behave in a storm. Everything after it is the test. Most of property insurance treats that second half as cost: a back office to minimize, a claims function to outsource and forget.
That is the mistake we are built to exploit. Price from the portfolio down and the operation has nothing to teach you — losses return as aggregates, too coarse to move a single rule. Price from the specific home up and every inspection and claim is a labeled data point on whether the bet was right.
Wind drives $100B+ in annual storm losses, most of it because the roof failed, and FORTIFIED™ construction cuts that risk by 50–70% for a modest added cost. We are wagering the homes we select hold up better when the wind blows, and the only place that wager is settled is the field.
Someone has to own that operation, run it well enough to trust the answer, and build it so the answer feeds back.
That is the role.
The team you're joining
The team is small and flat: a handful of engineers building the platform, a Head of Sales building the book of agents upstream of you, and the founders. You would be the first person who owns everything downstream of the quote, reporting to the President.
Not a role with a team to manage yet. Not a role where you own the software — engineering builds it; you are its primary customer and sharpest critic, the one who makes the spec match what happens when an agent binds a policy or a homeowner files a claim. Not a role where the procedures are written and you enforce them — you write them, then replace as many as you can with a system that needs no one standing behind it.
What you'd work on
Upstream, you help shape the gates that decide what we write and the surface we price against; downstream, you own the claim and the storm. Where the work is manual today, you turn it into a system tomorrow.
These are one operation, not six departments.
The upstream end, and the most strategic. You help design the underwriting gates and the surface area we price against — which homes we write, which attributes the model sees, what we can verify in the field — in partnership with senior leadership. Pricing stays algorithmic; the gates, inputs, and exceptions are where human judgment lives. You do not need to be a career underwriter, but you need to know what an agent can actually submit and where a rule breaks when the storm hits. When a submission falls outside what the system can adjudicate you handle it, then refine the system so it handles the next one without you.
The key function the role is judged on. You select and manage the TPA, design the claims protocol, and own the levers that set loss ratio in the field — cycle time, leakage, loss-adjustment expense, fraud. A catastrophe book is won or lost at the claims desk.
When a storm is forecast you stand up the surge operation: outreach to exposed policyholders before landfall, rapid inspection afterward to stop water intrusion before it multiplies, and readiness for the claims wave. The first storm is the real exam, and the playbook has to exist before it arrives.
Every bound policy rests on a claim about the engineering of a house. This module verifies and maintains that claim: post-bind inspections, the inspector network behind them, and the ingestion of third-party and aerial property data into the record the company prices on.
You are the primary customer of the policy administration system, not its owner. You make the spec match the field, you are the voice for how a policy is really written, serviced, endorsed, and cancelled, and you inform the build-versus-buy call. This is where you work most closely with agents, whose experience of the system decides whether they keep bringing us business.
The operation runs inside real constraints: a fronting carrier, surplus-lines tax and compliance, the billing and finance flows behind the book, and reporting to the reinsurer. You keep those clean and on time and produce the bordereaux and book rolls the capital partners read.
What we're looking for
You keep the entire underwriting-to-claims chain in view at once and see where a change in one place breaks something three steps downstream. You are, in effect, a systems engineer with deep domain expertise in this slice of insurance, and you design the chain so the pieces fit.
When you hit a manual process, your instinct is to specify the thing that removes it, not to staff it. Doing the same task by hand twice annoys you enough to make it permanent. You measure yourself partly by how much of the operation no longer needs you.
You understand that on a catastrophe book, loss ratio is realized at the claims desk, not in the rating engine, and that a botched first storm damages the agent and reinsurer relationships at once. You have run or sat close to claims under real loss pressure and respect what they can do to a company in either direction.
You read a workflow and wonder why it was built that way. You notice when an operational decision carries a pricing or capital implication nobody flagged, and you use that to make better calls without escalating each one.
You use modern tooling as a core part of how you work, and you have a view on where AI belongs in claims triage, document handling, and exception adjudication — and where it adds more risk than it removes.
You know insurance, but not yet Althea's version: pricing from the specific building up, selecting on construction, treating the loop from gate to claim as where the company learns. You absorb that fast and let it reshape how you build, rather than rebuilding the operation you ran last time.
Why it matters
The underwriting-to-claims operation is where Althea finds out whether it is right. The price is a hypothesis; the claim is the result. Run it well and the company learns faster than competitors who outsource and forget the same function — which homes hold up, which rules to tighten, what to take to our capital partners to re-rate the book. Run it badly and the thesis stays unproven no matter how good the model is, and the first storm becomes what defines us to agents and reinsurers.
Climate volatility is a generational problem, and homeowners insurance — mandatory, expensive, universal — is the largest available lever on what gets built and retrofitted. An operation that proves resilient homes perform better is how that lever moves.
That's the opportunity: a hard operational problem, a real consequence for whether the thesis holds, and a lever that changes the world.
Or email directly: [email protected]
The Althea Person
This interdisciplinary work depends on having the right people. We are actively assembling a team, a board, and a cap table. Maybe you belong at Althea.
About Althea
With Althea, insurance becomes an investment in resilience rather than a tax on bad luck. We make insurance more affordable for homeowners who build stronger roofs. We exist to help our homeowners weather the next storm. And the one after that.
We're well capitalized and tracking to write our first policy in fall 2026.
Why operations. Why the gate-to-claim loop.
Of all the parts of an insurance company, operations is the one most often treated as overhead and least often as intelligence. Priced from the specific building up, the loop from gate to claim is the instrument that tells you whether the price was right.
The quote rested on a claim about the roof; the operation confirms it and makes it a record.
Inspections, monitoring, and claims record how the home actually performs under storm. This is the labeled data the model never had.
Verified performance tightens rules, sharpens pricing, and becomes the evidence we take to reinsurers for better terms.
Lower volatility, better capital terms, a book more defensible than last quarter.
Operations is not the back office of this company. It is where the company learns.
Compensation
The range is a guide, not a ceiling; we calibrate to the depth of your craft and the scope of your ownership. Total compensation also includes benefits and equity — we want everyone who builds this to own a piece of it.