Principal Product Manager - Payments

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 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 Role

We’re hiring a Principal Product Manager — Payments. This is a Principal Product Manager role with Director‑level scope and expectations. It exists because some problems are too important, too complex, and too cross‑cutting to be solved through line management. You will be the single accountable product owner for globally scaling customer payments at tem — spanning payment platform, payment flows, commercial structures with payment providers, fraud and risk, regulatory and operational constraints, and AI‑enabled optimisation and automation. You will operate as a Principal IC with Director‑level scope, authority, and expectation.

Responsibilities

• Own tem’s global payments strategy end-to-end: define how customers pay, get paid, and experience value across markets.
• Deliver payment systems that scale internationally across currencies, regulations, and partners; make deliberate trade‑offs between speed, cost, reliability, and risk.
• Solve complex fintech problems in the open: payment flow resilience, retries, partial failures, chargebacks, disputes, reconciliation, and operational edge cases.
• Set clear product narratives and decision‑quality standards for financial correctness, trust, compliance, and experience.
• Be AI‑first in how money moves: apply AI to routing, optimisation, reconciliation, exception handling, anomaly detection, pricing, incentives, or forecasting.
• Orchestrate across Engineering, Design, Data, Ops, Finance, Legal, and GTM; influence without authority through sound thinking and structured communication.
• Make risk visible and explicit; build confidence that payment decisions are correct, auditable, and scalable.

Success Measures

• Payments scale confidently across new markets.
• Reduced operational burden and fewer manual interventions.
• Clearer, faster, better‑reasoned payment‑related decisions across teams.
• Customers experience payments as reliable, fair, and invisible.

Must Haves

• Deep FinTech product experience, specifically in payments, billing, or financial infrastructure.
• Proven experience scaling payment systems globally.
• Strong intuition for failure modes, edge cases, and operational reality.
• Comfortable working with regulation, compliance, finance, and risk partners.
• Experience shipping AI‑enabled fintech systems into production.
• Clear, structured communicator, especially in writing.
• Operates with director‑level judgement without needing a management title.

Bonus Points

• Experience in energy markets or other regulated, capital‑intensive systems.
• Experience designing commercial structures with payment providers across geographies.
• Experience building systems that improve reconciliation, risk controls, and auditability without harming UX.

Benefits & Perks

• Salary aligned to internal benchmarks and reviewed twice a year.
• Stock options so everyone has ownership in our mission.
• 25 days holiday plus public holidays.
• Swap public holidays for the ones that matter most to you, and enjoy your birthday off.
• Remote first and flexible working, with clear core hours and no internal meetings on Friday afternoons.
• Home Working and Wellbeing Budgets: Up to £1,200 or €1,200 per year for your remote setup. Up to £150 or €150 per month for wellbeing.

Interview Process

• Intro call with Talent, 30 minutes.
• Hiring Manager interview, 60 minutes.
• Skills interview with cross‑functional leaders, 60 to 90 minutes, including a practical exercise.
• Culture Add interview with leadership stakeholders, 45 minutes.

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.