Software Engineer

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.

02

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.

03

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.

parcel_truth — Data platform+

uw_engine — Underwriting & pricing+

dist_engine — Distribution+

storm_mode — Pre/post-storm orchestration+

capital_layer — Reporting & data contracts+

infra — Systems & DevOps+

surfaces — End-user interfaces+

04

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.

Backend-first, full-stack capable

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.

Business curiosity

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.

Integration & API engineering

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.

AI fluency

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.

Fast learner

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.

05

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.

Start a conversation

Or email directly: joe@altheainsurance.com

06

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.

-Are you equal parts analytical and creative, comfortable building models and crafting narratives that move people?
-Do you naturally break problems down to their foundations before building new solutions?
-Do you zoom out to understand the full system, then zoom in to fix the details that matter?
-Are you usually right about how events and people will behave, and do you study why you were right or wrong?
-Do you thrive in environments where risk is real and failure is common, and still keep going?
-Do colleagues fight to keep you, and can you collaborate while staying independent in your thinking?
-Do you learn quickly and apply new ideas across domains like finance, technology, policy, and climate?
-Can you turn complex topics into clear stories that help others make decisions and take action?
-Do you care more about solving the actual problem than defending an ideology or a favored solution?
-Are you as comfortable with people in the field as you are with people in the boardroom?
-Do you take pride in doing unglamorous work when it's the thing that moves the ball forward?
-Do you treat data and feedback as something that should change your mind, not just support your prior?
-Do you hold a high bar for integrity, especially when no one is watching and when tradeoffs are painful?
-Do you want to help build an enduring, modern climate resilience insurance company that outlasts all of us?
-Do you want to win, and bring others with you when you do?