People Moves: Hippo in California Adds Numerous Technology Leaders

Hippo in Palo Alto, Calif. has added new leadership to its technology team led by Chief Technology Officer Ran Harpaz.

The newly appointed technology leaders will be responsible for expanding and enhancing the delivery of Hippo’s technology services to reach specific audience segments across its business, from engineers to employees, to its customers.

• Klarissa Marenitch, Hippo’s CIO, will oversee the critical systems that support the productivity and efficiency of Hippo’s employee base, including information technology, corporate technology, information security, business & insurance systems, and employee productivity. Her prior role was CIO at Anaplan. She has led digital transformation and innovation initiatives for companies including Redbox, Sun Microsystems, Kohl’s and Macys.
• Lukasz Strozek, Hippo’s vice president of product engineering, will manage Hippo’s business to consumer and business to business, and insurance development teams and work in partnership with the product organization to develop new products that support Hippo’s customers and partner network. He joins Hippo from ecommerce payments firm Bolt, where he was vice president, engineering. Earlier in his career, Lukasz co-founded an online lending company acquired by digital finance firm SoFi.
• Dalit Shahar joined Hippo in September 2019 from Globality Inc. and was promoted to the role of vice president, engineering operations. She will oversee the planning, execution and release processes of Hippo’s engineering operations, as well as the quality operations.
• Mike Gordon joined Hippo in September 2019 and was promoted to Vice president, platform engineering. He will oversee the cloud infrastructure, platform core services, engineering productivity, data platforms, API capabilities and service-oriented-architecture rollout across all of Hippo engineering solutions. Prior to Hippo, he spent eight years as a software engineering leader at Google.
• Tal Hornstein, Hippo’s chief security information officer, has more than 25 years of industry experience in multiple security-related startups and tech firms, including five years at Globality Inc. and 13 years with Skybox Security. He will be responsible for driving information security strategy and operations for Hippo and scaling Hippo’s information security team, secure cloud infrastructure and development lifecycle, user education, compliance and risk governance.
• Ruben Kogel, Hippo’s director of data & analytics, will oversee a center-of-excellence in data and analytics, and support scaling the company’s data science efforts. He was most recently at Lime where he built and led the company’s data science and analytics team.

Hippo is headquartered in Palo Alto and has offices in Austin and Dallas, Texas. Hippo is a licensed property /casualty insurance agent with products underwritten by various insurance companies.

Topics California Tech Leadership