--- title: 'Senior AI Product Engineer at Kota' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-product-engineer-kota-europe-afp3s6rrp5v8' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-09' --- # Senior AI Product Engineer at Kota - **Company:** Kota - **Location:** Europe - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-08-17 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kota/891b3b57-ec1a-44e3-8b7a-bcd559935158 ## Job description Job Title: Senior AI Product Engineer Location: Remote +/- 4 hours GMT for collaboration Type: Full-time, Permanent Working style: Remote-first ## 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 are 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 have raised more than 20M EUR from leading investors like EQT Ventures, Eurazeo, Northzone, and Frontline, along with founders and executives from Workday, Remote, Personio, OpenAI, and more. We work remotely and our team is spread across the world. ## The Role This is a role on Kota's AI pod. We are building out a generative AI capability from the ground up, the first of its kind at Kota, and we need a senior engineer who can help us do that with rigour and taste. You will work directly with the AI Product Lead to design, build, and evaluate agent systems that help Kota's employer admins and employees make better use of their benefits data. This is early-stage, high-ownership work. You will be making real architectural decisions, not executing a predefined playbook. ## What You'll Do - Design and ship AI agent systems end to end, from early experiments through to production, owning the data access layer, retrieval strategy, and integration with Kota's existing infrastructure including Metabase and internal APIs - Build and own the evaluation framework from scratch, including golden datasets, regression harnesses, and the ability to distinguish retrieval from generation failures; think adversarially about prompt injection, data boundary violations, and silent failure modes in a regulated context - Set the technical direction for AI at Kota, with a seat at the table on agent architecture, and where AI creates the most leverage across the product - Work across the pod and Platform team to surface new AI opportunities, collaborate with the AI Product Lead, and raise the bar on engineering practice through peer review and documentation - Pick up slack and expand the role, this is an early pod with room to shape it; the remit will grow with you ## What We're Looking For Essential - 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years working directly on LLM or AI agent systems in production - Strong grasp of agent architecture, including context management, tool use, retrieval strategies, and prompt design, and the ability to make and defend tradeoffs between them - Experience building evaluation frameworks, not just using them: golden datasets, regression testing, and retrieval vs. generation failure analysis - Comfort working across the stack - Clear written communication; you can explain a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder without losing precision Strong plus - Background in fintech, payroll, HR tech, or benefits; you understand why data freshness and auditability matter in regulated contexts - Experience with AWS, Azure, or the broader Microsoft ecosystem - Experience generating synthetic evaluation data to bootstrap eval coverage before real usage data is available - Experience working in early-stage or scale-up environments where the architecture is still forming What good looks like You have built an AI system that failed in production and have a clear, unsentimental account of what went wrong, what you put in place to catch it earlier, and what you would do differently. You think about evals before you think about demos. You know the difference between a retrieval problem and a generation problem. You make deliberate decisions about what data an agent needs and when, rather than defaulting to retrieve-everything or hardcode-everything. ## Our Values - Have Integrity. We care deeply about our why and it will not jeopardise our how. - Care Deeply. Our products are our story; we look at the details and 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, and now we do this every day. Kota Benefits - Health Insurance via Kota - Workplace Pension with matched contributions up to 5% via Kota (country dependent) - WFH stipend to support your home office - 25 days of Paid Time Off, work hard and recharge fully - Annual company-wide offsite and dedicated team offsite - Attractive stock options 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. ## About Kota ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Kota builds the internet’s infrastructure for employee benefits, offering a single platform that connects companies to health, life, and retirement providers across every market. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: Dublin, Ireland - **Founded**: 2022 - **Founders**: Luke Mackey (CEO & Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Financial Services / Employee Benefits (InsurTech / HR Tech) - **Target customers**: B2B; core fit for growing UK and Ireland companies, particularly SME and mid-market teams; enterprise functionality available for larger organizations. - **Mission or purpose**: To build the internet infrastructure for financial benefits — powering health insurance, pension, and life insurance for a new generation of employees. ## Products & Services - **Kota Platform**: An all-in-one employee benefits platform that replaces both traditional brokers and legacy benefits software. It lets HR teams set up, manage, and track pension, health insurance, life assurance, income protection, and critical illness cover in one place. - **Kota Embed (API)**: An API that allows partners (e.g., HRIS platforms like Remote and Helios) to embed benefits directly into their own products. - **Spend Cards**: Issue and manage cards for employee allowances with automated controls, reporting, and payroll reconciliation. - **Flexible Benefits**: Employees can choose benefits that matter to them (e.g., gym, wellness, travel) — all managed in the Kota app. - **Built-in Brokerage**: Kota is a regulated insurance intermediary (licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland and an appointed representative of the FCA in the UK), so procurement and management happen in one system. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$22.4M** (€20m+), with a $14.5M Series A announced in May 2025. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Eurazeo (lead Series A), EQT Ventures, Northzone, Frontline Ventures, 9Yards, Plug and Play Ventures. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount grew **76.4% YoY** to 61 employees. - Powering benefits for **65,000+ employees** (as of mid-2025, growing to 100,000+ by 2026). - **13 active job postings** as of mid-2025. - Licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland as an insurance intermediary — the only insurance benefits platform with regulatory approval across the EEA and the UK. - Powers benefits for platforms like Remote and Helios. ## Competitive Advantages - **Regulatory moat**: Kota is a regulated broker and platform in one — a combination that is rare and difficult to replicate. Licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland and FCA in the UK, it can procure and manage insurance directly. - **Deep carrier integrations**: Direct integrations with insurance carriers across dozens of countries, removing costly intermediation and enabling real-time, end-to-end automation. - **API-first infrastructure**: Unlike legacy benefits software, Kota offers an API that lets partners embed benefits natively, creating a platform ecosystem. - **All-in-one approach**: Replaces brokers, portals, spreadsheets, and admin — HRIS sync, payroll reconciliation, employee app, and brokerage all in one system. ## Strategic Focus - **Expand carrier reach**: Deepening integrations with insurance carriers in more markets (UK, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and beyond). - **Deepen core product experience**: Building the best possible experience for health insurance, pension, and life assurance. - **Scale the platform**: Growing the team (hiring across engineering, design, sales, and people functions) to support rapid customer acquisition and product development. - **Embedded benefits**: Growing the “Kota Embed” API to become the default way other platforms offer benefits. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Small, high-bar team where everyone owns real work from day one. Described as “first-class and ready for anything” with values of integrity and care. - **Remote/hybrid policy**: Hybrid/remote-friendly with a WFH stipend. Team is spread across Ireland, UK, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Brazil. - **Notable perks**: Competitive salary, stock options, health insurance, up to 5% matched pension contribution, generous paid time off, WFH stipend. - **Engineering culture**: Opportunity to design a new category from scratch, work directly with founders, and ship work that reaches real employees on day one. Open roles include Product Engineer (Frontend/Backend), Senior Mobile Engineer, and Senior Product Designer. - **Impact**: Building infrastructure that supports employees through illness, loss, or retirement — a mission-driven, high-responsibility environment. ## Sources 1. [kota.io](https://www.kota.io/) 2. [kota.io/careers](https://www.kota.io/careers) 3. [kota.io/blog/series-a-announcement](https://www.kota.io/blog/series-a-announcement) 4. [LinkedIn - Kota](https://ie.linkedin.com/company/kotabenefits) 5. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com - Kota](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kota) ## Other roles at Kota - [Product Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-kota-london-13zt6xatnmdx) — London, United Kingdom - [Strategy & Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/strategy-operations-manager-kota-dublin-k7bj3xqs4g4f) — Dublin, Ireland - [Senior Product Engineer - Pensions and Spend](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-pensions-and-spend-kota-remote-2q4dd3dk9rqn) - [Growth Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-manager-kota-london-86by611v9h6r) — London, United Kingdom - [Senior Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-kota-remote-s1cv3trmk2v7) - [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-kota-dublin-91gkrz04kjca) — Dublin, Ireland - [Senior Product Designer - Embed](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-embed-kota-remote-vpy3bsy4ybsd) - [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-kota-london-6xaz84s8exym) — London, United Kingdom - [Technical Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-support-engineer-kota-dublin-mb6rebyhxbpp) — Dublin, Ireland - [Senior Product Engineer (Backend)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-backend-kota-remote-n54mmyrz7z3j)