Head of Retail Sales

Location: Dublin / London / Remote
Type: Full-time, Permanent
Working style: Hybrid / Remote
Reports to: Head of Retail Sales

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 hiring a Head of Retail Sales to take ownership of activity related to the competence, supervision, and ongoing development of customer-facing staff across Kota’s regulated entities (Ireland and UK currently). This role has been carved out due to Kota’s rapid growth and the increasing volume of activity across our sales organisation.

On the quality side, you’re the person who listens to the calls, reads the files, and decides whether the information and advice we’re giving customers is clear, fair, suitable and compliant with the rules of the market we’re operating in. On the training and competence side, you own the minimum competency register, onboard new staff through their supervision period, and deliver product and regulatory training so our people meet and exceed the required standard. However, this role goes further than traditional compliance monitoring; we also want you to build the reporting, analytics, and monitoring that turns data into actionable insight.

The role is operational in nature, rather than focused on policy; it is a hands-on quality and competence role. This person will report to Kota’s COO but will work closely with the company’s Head of Retail Sales, as well as Compliance, Legal and Sales teams.

The role can be based in Dublin, London or remotely.

What You'll Do

• Quality assurance and supervision. Review sales calls, check files and suitability assessments, provide feedback and quality scoring, supervise new entrants and existing staff, and calibrate scoring across reviewers, products, and jurisdictions

• Training and competence. Own Kota’s minimum competency register, manage mandatory training (including CPD monitoring and compliance), build out product and regulatory training, and guidance on benefits, also translating QA findings into coaching

• Reporting, analytics and monitoring. Build QA reporting and management information, surface trend analysis, implement behavioural correction measures, and set up monitoring tools

• Frameworks and governance. Maintain and improve QA setup with excellent record-keeping, work cross functionally to support conduct, training and governance, and support Head of Retail Sales for regulatory reviews and submissions.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of experience in financial services

• Proven sales background with regulated industries; you know what good advice looks like because you have delivered it

• QFA holder (Qualified Financial Adviser); recognised by the Central Bank of Ireland under the MCC 2017 across the five categories of retail financial products

• Working knowledge of conduct regulation in at least one of our markets

• Hands-on training and competence experience: maintaining a competency register, supervising new entrants through to competent-adviser status, running CPD tracking and compliance monitoring for a regulated team

• Experience reviewing advised sales and forming a clear judgement on suitability, quality of advice, and regulatory compliance

• Bias for action. You prefer to drive things to completion and achieve results

• 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.