The problem
Homeowners insurance is supposed to protect people from catastrophe. Instead, the system is retreating from it. As climate volatility rises, the industry's only tools are blunt ones — higher prices, narrower coverage, fewer homes insured at all. Communities are edging toward uninsurability without becoming meaningfully safer.
The reason is structural. Large insurers price from the portfolio down: base rates set from backward-looking loss experience, risk segmented into territory buckets, uncertainty managed through broad repricing and capacity pullbacks. The system never looks at the building — which means it can't reward resilience, and it can't learn. When volatility rises, it can only retreat.
But the evidence that a different approach works already exists.
Wind drives $100B+ in annual storm losses — and growing. Most of the physical risk lives in the roof. FORTIFIED — an engineering-based roofing standard tested across decades of hurricane landfalls — lowers that risk by 50–70% for a modest cost. The insight isn't just that resilient homes perform dramatically better — it's that insurance is the strongest lever available to make resilience the default.
When Alabama opened 2,000 grant slots for FORTIFIED roofs last year, 78,000 homeowners applied. The demand for resilience is real and proven. What's missing is the infrastructure to meet it at scale.
That's what Althea is building. A feedback loop that starts with the specific home, the specific roof, and proof of what is actually there — learns what building practices actually work in storms, rewards them, and pulls mitigation adoption forward using the existing rails already inside insurance.
That's the gap. Not knowledge. Infrastructure. And we'd love for you to help us close it.
The team you're joining
This is not a technology-first business looking for product-market fit. It's a thesis-validated business that needs infrastructure to operate. The distance between where we are and where we need to be is almost entirely an engineering problem — and it's the kind of problem where getting the foundations right determines whether the company compounds or stalls.
A carrier can copy a number. They cannot quickly copy the machine — and without the machine, the number either doesn't work or doesn't scale.
Althea's founding engineer is a seasoned systems architect with deep experience building complex, regulated infrastructure. The foundations — data architecture, core domain model, system design — are being laid with serious craft and long-term thinking.
What we're adding is execution capacity and ownership breadth. You'll work directly alongside the founding engineer on a roadmap that spans a proprietary policy administration system, a parcel-level data platform, distribution integrations, underwriting infrastructure, and the agent and homeowner-facing surfaces above it all.
This is not a ticket-queue role. You'll have real context — business, product, and technical — and you're expected to use it.
What you'd work on
This is not a role where you build a product. The product is the policy. What you build is the infrastructure that makes the policy possible — and that makes every subsequent policy more defensible than the last.
You'll touch the full technical surface area of an early-stage insurance company. The surface area is wide. We're honest about that.
The foundation everything else sits on. A governed, time-stamped parcel record that fuses upstream evidence, public data, and third-party data.
This is the asset that compounds.
A deterministic rules engine — versioned, testable, auditable — that sits on the truth record and implements GLM-based rating logic. UW exception handling pathways.
Event-driven orchestration that turns partner activity — roofer referrals, agent submissions, homeowner inquiries — into bound policies while feeding structured data back into the truth record.
Before a storm, identify exposed properties and deploy targeted interventions. After the storm, rapid inspections to stop water intrusion before it multiplies losses. Parametric triggers fast-track claims when wind thresholds are crossed. Every outcome feeds the system.
Portfolio monitoring, book rolls, TPA reporting, and data exports structured for fronting carrier and reinsurance partners. Reproducible configurations and evidence-linked policy records.
Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, incident response, API uptime. Security architecture with secrets management, identity, auth and access control across a multi-tenant system.
Roofer and homeowner quote previews. FNOL flow. High-trust transactional UIs and form-heavy workflows where clarity and reliability matter more than polish.
What we're looking for
We care about what you've built and how you think — not how many years it took you to get there.
You're most at home designing APIs, data models, and event-driven systems — but you can ship a clean React interface when the work calls for it. You don't need a front-end specialist to build a working, user-facing feature.
You read the spec and wonder why it was written that way. You ask what the agent actually does when they open the portal. You notice when a technical decision has a business implication that nobody flagged. You use that curiosity to write your own specs for the problems in your domain, make sound trade-offs without escalating every decision, and push work forward independently.
REST APIs, webhooks, event-driven architecture, multi-tenant auth, data contracts and schema evolution. Experience with fintech, insurtech, or regulated-data environments is a plus, not a requirement.
You use agent-assisted coding tools as a core part of how you work today — not occasionally, not experimentally. You have a point of view on where AI belongs in a development workflow and where it introduces more risk than it removes. You stay near the current edge and update that view as the tools change.
Insurance is a new domain for most people. We don't expect you to arrive knowing it. We do expect you to learn it quickly, take it seriously, and let it shape how you build.
Why it matters
The work is unglamorous in the way that foundations always are. It's also the highest-leverage engineering work at the company.
Every decision we make in the first year — from how the policy event model is structured, to how integrations are designed and data flows from roofer to policy record to reinsurer — shapes what Althea can become at scale. The first generation of insurtechs automated the transaction. Althea is engineering the relationships — between the roofer, the agent, the homeowner, and the capital partner. The infrastructure you build is what makes that possible.
Climate volatility is one of our generational challenges, and homeowners insurance — a mandatory, expensive purchase — is the biggest available lever to change incentives. If Althea is successful, the result isn't just a strong company. It's a structural shift in what gets built and retrofitted, a world where more homes remain insurable because they actually hold up.
That's the opportunity: a hard technical problem, a large business outcome, 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 wind. Why roofs.
Of all the perils in property insurance, wind is the one where the gap between what's physically possible and what the industry actually does is widest. The science of wind-resistant construction is mature. The standards exist. The construction methods are available today. What's missing is the system that connects better building to better insurance — automatically, at scale.
Althea starts with roofs because that's where the physics are clearest. How a roof is attached, sealed, and detailed determines whether a home rides out a storm or loses its envelope. It's the single highest-leverage intervention point, and it's a decision homeowners already make every 8–10 years.
The opportunity is a feedback loop — not a one-time transaction. Each verified roof makes the next policy smarter, the portfolio stronger, and the terms from capital partners better. The system learns and compounds.
Althea shows up at this moment — through roofers and agents — with a reason to build stronger.
Inspections, photos, and data confirm the roof meets wind-resistant specs. This proof becomes a permanent record.
Lower premiums, better coverage, stable renewals. The homeowner sees a direct financial return on resilience.
Lower losses, lower volatility, better terms from capital partners. Every policy makes the next one more defensible.
Wind and roofs are the foundation. The same logic extends to hail, wildfire hardening, and flood mitigation as the platform grows.
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.