About this role
• About Tern
• Tern is a venture-backed software company on a mission to reshape the $127B travel agency industry—by giving power back to the entrepreneurs who built it.
• Nearly 98% of travel agencies are small businesses. These businesses have been chronically underserved by technology. We're here to change that. Our platform helps travel advisors run more efficient, professional, and profitable operations—giving them the modern infrastructure they need to lead the next chapter of travel.
• But the impact goes beyond business. Travel advisors help clients move more intentionally through the world. When a traveler works with an advisor, they're more likely to avoid overtouristed hotspots and more likely to spend their dollars in places where they can do real good. That's the kind of travel we want more of.
• At Tern, we believe in small business. We believe in the power of travel. And we're building the future of both.
• Finance Product Lead
• Travel advisors run small businesses that move real money. Clients pay deposits, agencies pay agents, suppliers pay commissions, and most of the accounting under all of it still runs through tools built decades ago. Tern has spent the last two years building the workflow layer advisors and agency owners actually want to use. Now we're building the financial system of record that sits underneath it.
• This role owns that build. You won't be starting from zero. We already have credit card authorization, a real commission reconciliation suite, and agent payment tracking in production. What's missing is the layer that lets agency owners actually run their business on Tern: service fee collection, membership fee billing, invoicing, month-end close, exports, and the GL flows that connect all of it.
• For the first six months, you'll partner closely with the Head of Product on the existing commission and payout work, gradually taking ownership of those flows as you ramp. After that, the entire financial infrastructure surface area is yours: virtual cards, payroll, expense management, international multi-currency, accounting integrations.
• What you'll do
• Own the financial infrastructure roadmap beyond the host launch: virtual cards, payroll, expense management, multi-currency payments, and accounting system integrations
Build the compliance and risk foundation Tern needs to operate in the high-risk travel payments spaceShip service fee collection for host agencies, integrated with existing commission and payout flows
Design and ship the GL layer: invoicing, month-end close and locking, transaction exports, and transaction history views
Ship membership fee billing for sub-agency agents under host hierarchies
Shadow the Head of Product on existing commission and payout work for the first six months, taking targeted pieces off her plate as you ramp
Partner with the Agency engineering squad to extend the existing reconciliation suite to enterprise-scale host workflows
• What you have
• Founding or near-founding PM experience at a fintech that built payments, ledgering, and compliance infrastructure from the ground up, owning the end-to-end stack, not a single slice of it
Deep working knowledge of general ledger architecture, payment rails, risk, and compliance- you can have a real conversation with engineers on any of them
Shipped a payments product through a scale inflection point (10x volume, new market, new compliance regime) and know what actually breaks
Comfortable in a small-team environment where the PM does customer research, writes specs, and unblocks engineering directly
• Bonus points
• Payroll product experience
Multi-currency or international payments experience
Worked in a high-risk vertical (travel, marketplaces, gaming, healthcare)
Helped scale the product org at a Series A or B fintech
• What we value @ Tern
• 🌱 We're always leveling up. Whether you're deepening your craft, learning from a teammate, or embracing a new challenge, growth is core to our identity.
• 🧭 We act with optimistic agency. We take initiative, seek clarity, and move forward, even when the path isn't obvious. Through every peak and valley, we lead with curiosity, laughter, kindness, and resolve.
• 💪 We expect operational excellence. We ship value to our users every single week. We believe that compounding habits lead to sustainable productivity, consistency, and mutual trust.
• Operating Principles:
• 👂 We deeply understand our users. At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in.
• * 📣 We speak up and move forward. Everyone at Tern has a voice and a responsibility to use it. We invite healthy tension, share dissenting v