Senior Manager, Underwriting

About Pula

We are an insuretech firm that provides agriculture insurance design and execution services, specialising in index based insurance and are backed by top tier VC investors who have invested more than $25 million in the business. Since 2015 we have provided climate insurance to 19 million smallholder farmers, 41% of which were women across 13 markets in Africa and Asia who pay an average of $6.8 per season to insure their crops. So far we've unlocked over $2.5 billion of capital from local and international insurance markets for climate risks since we started in 2015 and paid out $40.8 million to our client farmers. 

According to the UN's InterGovernmental Panel for Climate Change more than 3.3 billion people globally live in hotspots with high vulnerability to climate change and are now already feeling the impact of climate change through increased temperatures and increasingly erratic rainfall. Insurance is a tool for vulnerable households in these affected regions to adapt to the effects that climate change is already having today on these households. It is a tool that enables for compensation payment for losses and damages that these households had no part in causing. Insurance compensation enables these households to make adjustments to their day to day livelihoods and practices and therefore allows for an equitable and just transition.

We are a for profit organisation, and have raised over $10 million from leading venture and institutional investors as well as developed philanthropic relationships with private foundations and bilateral donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and German Insure Resilience Solutions Fund that have accelerated investments in our target markets.

At Pula, our values are: 

• Obsessed with results: We are responsible for our future and therefore we get things done
• Connect the Dots: We continuously identify different customer needs & business problems and build solutions that deliver value.
• Have a Can do Attitude We dare to do things differently to make things work.
• We have each others' back: We look out for each other & we share high quality, timely feedback that makes us better. 

Pula is proudly fast paced, constantly learning from the challenges we face and overcome. We are proudly culturally diverse but united in our ambition of continuous high-performance. By challenging ourselves we believe that we can overcome the hard problems we love solving. 

About Pula Re

Pula Reinsurance Ltd (Pula Re) is the venture by Pula Advisors AG to enter the reinsurance space leveraging on its existing market presence across Africa & Asia. Pula Re is domiciled in Bermuda and will be focussed on emerging economies, targeting high-growth markets across Africa, Asia, and a select exploratory regions such as Latin America, with a strong focus on agriculture, parametric, climate, property cat, speciality and transition risks, along with conventional risks while benefitting and protecting those most vulnerable rural farming communities and in specific women.

Overall Objective

As an early member of the leadership team, you will play a pioneering role in establishing the Property, Casualty & Specialty Lines function from the ground up. This position combines marketing, technical underwriting, claims management, and reinsurance placement, with a strong focus on underwriting discipline, profitable growth, and relationship building.

You will identify new business opportunities and manage or develop relationships with insurers, reinsurance brokers, and other reinsurers to expand Pula RE's footprint across its target markets. It is a hands-on, market-facing role that will require regular travel across Pula RE's focus regions. Team expansion will evolve in line with business growth.

Key Responsibilities 

• Develop relationships with insurers, RI Brokers and other reinsurers to maximize opportunities and achieve profitable growth. 
• Initiate market visits and calls to market players to identify sales opportunities and collect intelligence.
• Achieving new business premium, renewal premium retention and monitoring rate, exposure and retention.
• Collaborate with HoDs & senior members of broader Pula Group to develop synergies and local tactics to attract and retain business while executing Pula Re's underwriting strategies and initiatives.
• Within Pula Re's guidelines and granted underwriting authority, evaluate new and renewal account information to determine risk acceptability, terms / conditions to be quoted, and pricing.
• Make sound risk and pricing decisions that achieve profitable loss ratios. 
• Maintain underwriting quality as per Pula Re underwriting framework. 
• Document underwriting file to support acceptability and pricing in accordance with Pula Re guidelines. 
• Achieve customer service standards, including established objectives for: 
  • New business quote turnaround. 
  • Renewal quotes 
  • Endorsement, cancellation, audits and other transactions.
  • Policy issuance 
• Provide detailed issuance instructions to ensure policy is delivered consistent with quoted terms and conditions and in accordance with established guidelines relative to policy construction.
• Review mid-term endorsement requests for acceptability and provide instructions for processing.
• Evaluate premium/risk referrals to determine class acceptability and/or appropriateness of current exposure base. Adjust current terms with acceptable changes to ensure the company gets timely payment of adequate premium. 
• Order and review inspections to confirm accounts written are consistent with preliminary underwriting information and act when the inspection reveals unacceptable risk characteristics. 
• Determine if retro-facultative reinsurance is needed and if so, factor retro cost in gross pricing, complete cession procedures; documentation file and follow established workflow procedure to ensure proper reporting / accounting. 
• Managing claims management encompassing recovery from retro partners, payouts cedants and evaluating all claim slips and related documentation.
• Support other team members as assigned when the other underwriter is traveling or out on vacation / sick time. 
• Building underwriting acumen of internal and external stakeholders through training and development opportunities.

Who you are

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree (MBA, Master's in Business, or degree in Engineering/Technology) preferred.
• Professional insurance certification (e.g., CII, Insurance Institute of Kenya) advantageous but not mandatory.
• Proven success in commercial lines property, casualty, or specialty insurance, ideally within a reinsurer or reinsurance broker of repute.
• Experience in surplus lines underwriting and retrocession treaty design highly preferred.
• Underwriting experience in the parametric insurance sector will be beneficial.
• Strong network and relationships across insurance and reinsurance markets in and beyond Africa.
• Skilled in process mapping, operational efficiency, and cost management.

Skills & Attributes

• Entrepreneurial mindset with a bias for action and ownership.
• Strong commercial judgment and decision-making ability.
• High integrity, resilience, and reliability in delivering results.
• Adaptive and unafraid of ambiguity or high-pressure environments.
• Change champion; open to unlearning convention and embracing innovation.
• Gravitas and presence to engage senior stakeholders and external partners.
• Excellent communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills.
• Growth-oriented leader passionate about learning and developing others.
• Fluent in English; knowledge of other international languages is an asset.

What Pula will bring to the table

• Your work matters: At Pula, you'll shape systems that give millions of smallholder farmers access to insurance for the first time. You'll join a team that has already reached over 19 million farmers across Africa and Asia, and you'll directly contribute to scaling this impact even further.
• Career development: You'll be working in a high-performance environment with strong mentorship and leadership that values transparency, execution, and personal growth. As we enter our next phase of accelerated expansion, you'll naturally gain opportunities to take on new responsibilities and grow your career.
• Global recognition:  Backed by top global investors and foundations;  Pula is a solid, well-funded organization. Our work is recognized globally (from winning the Singapore FinTech Festival Award to being featured in The Economist and TED Talks) and you'll be part of a brand that is respected in the industry.
• Purpose with Rewards:  Few opportunities combine career advancement with genuine purpose. At Pula, your work directly contributes to financial security for farmers in emerging markets, while also offering competitive pay, performance incentives, and an employee share option plan with equity upside.

To learn more about Pula you can visit

TED Talk: Crop Insurance, an Idea Worth Seeding
New York Times: He Grew up on a Farm. Now, He Helps Protect Them
The Economist: The Poor, Who Most Need Insurance, Are Least Likely to Have It

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English.

Pula's mission is to provide farmer resilience. To achieve this, we put our small holder farmers that use our services and the employees that provide them at the heart of everything we do. For that purpose, Pula was created to be an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.