Head of Underwriting

About Solva

Solva is building AI-native risk infrastructure for insurance, an $8 trillion industry. We're backed by Y Combinator, SV Angel and angel investors, including Paul Graham, that have funded companies such as OpenAI, Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Databricks and GitHub. We have an advisory board of experienced insurance executives and founders.

Our team previously built one of the world’s fastest-growing insurers to $120M in revenue and founded a bank moving over $1B a year. Now we are taking on one of the world’s largest industries and rebuilding it from the ground up with AI.

Solva is a Y Combinator company and has emerged as one of the fastest growing and best-funded startups.

About the role

We're hiring our Head of Underwriting to define how Solva selects and prices risk. You'll set the underwriting strategy for the insurance programs we build with partners, from risk appetite and guidelines to authority and referral rules, and make sure every policy we write is one we want on the books.

You'll work directly with the founders, our actuaries and engineers to turn underwriting judgement into AI-native systems: workflows where data and models do the heavy lifting and underwriters focus on the decisions that matter.

This is a true ownership role. You'll build the underwriting function from scratch, represent Solva with carrier and reinsurance partners, and hire the team that comes after you.

What you'll do

• Define risk appetite, underwriting guidelines and authority levels for each program we launch
• Underwrite and approve new partner programs and individual risks outside automated rules
• Work with engineers to encode underwriting logic into our AI systems, and decide where human review is needed
• Monitor portfolio performance, loss ratios and data quality, and act fast when something drifts
• Own relationships with carrier and reinsurance partners, including audits, bordereaux and reporting
• Build and lead the underwriting team as we scale

What we're looking for

• 10+ years of commercial P&C underwriting experience, including leading an underwriting team or book
• Experience with delegated authority, MGA or program business
• Strong technical underwriting judgement across multiple commercial lines
• Comfortable with data and excited to work closely with engineers and AI systems
• Trusted by carriers and reinsurers, with the network to prove it
• Gold star if you've built an underwriting function at an early-stage MGA or insurtech