Payment Operations Specialist (6 Month FTC)

Who We Are: We are rebuilding the energy transaction, making it transparent and fair. Our goal is to put power back where it belongs, in the hands of customers and to take on one of the most critical problems of our century, access to low cost electricity. Tem exists to fix a broken global energy market that’s long favoured legacy operators, intermediaries, and opaque pricing. Today’s electricity system was not designed for rapid decarbonisation, AI-driven efficiency or fair access for the actual users - businesses and generators. We’ve built the first AI native transaction infrastructure to reinvent how electricity is bought, sold and priced. Our technology is designed to cut out the inefficient fees, automate complex market flows, and bring transparency and fairness to energy transactions at scale.

In late 2025, after extraordinary growth, we closed a $75 million Series B - led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Albion, Atomico, Allianz, Hitachi Ventures, Schroders Capital and others - positioning us for global expansion, deeper product innovation and category leadership. We’re scaling internationally and building toward a future where AI-driven infrastructure is foundational to electricity markets worldwide. Since launch, our modern utility product, known as RED, has already facilitated thousands of business customers and billions in energy transaction value, proving that modern software and AI can transform an industry built on legacy systems. At tem, we’re not just building another energy company, we’re rearchitecting market infrastructure so that transparency, efficiency and sustainability become the default, not the exception.

The Business Need: As our Payment CX function takes ownership of the experiential side of payments, an operational gap opens up: the monthly assembly and execution of a £20m+ payment run, plus the reconciliation and admin behind it, currently rests heavily on a small team and is creaky already. This is a load-bearing, revenue-critical process that is not going away in the next six months. We need senior cover now to run it confidently and reduce single-person risk, while we accelerate the work to automate it - a bridge, not a permanent backfill of the old shape.

The Role: We're hiring a Payment Operations Specialist on a six-month contract. This is a senior, hands-on operational role to bridge a live gap while we build our way out of it. You'll take ownership of the monthly payment run end to end and the reconciliation and admin around it, giving us contingency and confidence in a process we can't afford to drop. This is back-of-house operations, not a customer-facing role.

You will:

• Own the assembly and execution of the monthly £20m+ payment run.
• Make sure every customer who should be billed is billed, and every payment owed is collected.
• Reconcile incoming funds and resolve edge cases (BACS returns, back payments, misattributed funds).
• Reduce key-person risk by documenting and de-risking the run so it no longer depends on one person.

You will report into the Service Manager, Customer Operations.

Responsibilities:

• Run the payment cycle
• Assemble the monthly payment run accurately and on time.
• Validate that the right customers are charged the right amounts.
• Execute the run and manage the reconciliation of funds afterwards.
• Keep the money flowing
• Chase down billing and collection gaps so owed revenue actually lands.
• Triage and resolve high-priority edge cases and exceptions.
• Handle the operational admin that follows the run each month.
• De-risk and document
• Map the current process end to end so it's no longer locked in one person's head.
• Build the documentation and contingency that lets others run it confidently.
• Flag the highest-value automation opportunities to the team building toward that.

Requirements:

• Must haves
• Deep, hands-on experience running high-volume, complex payment or billing operations.
• A track record of owning reconciliation end to end in a regulated or complex-transaction environment.
• Strong first-principles operational thinking - can take a messy process and reflow it cleanly.
• Available to start quickly and comfortable operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.

Bonus points:

• Energy / utilities payments exposure (half-hourly metering, the utilities layer), though context is available from the wider team.
• Exposure to automating or systematising payment operations.

Engagement & Terms: Six-month contract, with scope to extend or transition by mutual agreement. Day rate to reflect the seniority and the urgency. Remote first and flexible working, with clear core hours and no internal meetings on Friday afternoons.

Interview Process: We move fast. For a contract role of this urgency, expect a short process. Intro call with Talent, 30 minutes. Working session with the Hiring Manager on the payment run and how you'd approach it, 60 minutes. Reference / track-record check.

We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences, and identities, including those that are traditionally underrepresented in the tech and energy sectors. If you’re excited about this role but not sure you meet every requirement, we’d still love to hear from you. Your unique perspective could be exactly what we’re looking for.