People Performance Manager

📈 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, 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 People Performance Manager to join our Performance Service.

tem is growing fast. Our goal is to get better as we get bigger - revenue growing faster than headcount. In practice that means keeping our strongest people engaged and performing, getting new joiners productive quickly, and enabling our leaders to multiply their impact over time. Most companies solve that with layers of management. We don't. Our leaders (Player-Coaches) coach their teams while staying hands-on with the work, which means the systems around them have to do more of the lifting. That's where the Performance Service comes in.

We're a team of four, and we own how tem runs as an organisation: the operating rhythm (how work gets planned, tracked, escalated and reported), the onboarding and development that build capability, the frameworks that define what good performance looks like and how people progress and get paid, and the operational backbone of contracts, benefits and payroll. We don't own recruitment. We're adding a second Performance Partner because we need more hands on deck - both partnering with our leaders day to day, and building the frameworks that support them.

Your patch is sustained performance - the part that runs continuously once someone is through the door. You'll carry a portfolio of leaders across our Engines and Services that you're accountable for, and you'll co-own the frameworks that sit underneath them alongside the rest of the team. You will not be handed a finished playbook to administer. You'll report into the Performance Service Manager. HR experience is welcome but not required - we're open to operators, people who've led teams, and the sort of person who ends up owning whatever the company needs next.

In your first 12 months, you might:

• Become the first call for a portfolio of leaders on anything to do with their people - performance calls, team decisions and hard conversations.

• Co-design how progression, performance standards, evaluation and reward actually work at tem, alongside the rest of the Performance team.

• Handle live cases end to end - performance management, difficult conversations, exits and restructures.

• Use AI and automation so the operational layer runs itself and your time goes on judgement, not process.

• Turn recurring employee and manager pain points into better processes, tools, guidance or self-service, and measure whether they work.

🛠️ Responsibilities

• Coach and challenge: be a leader's first call on anything to do with their people - a decision they want a second view on, coaching on how to handle a situation, or a read on employment law - and hold a position when you disagree with them.

• Raise the bar: hold leaders to a high standard on performance, potential, pay and progression - help them make sharper calls, and hold consistency across your patch.

• Handle live cases end to end: performance management, difficult conversations, exits and restructures.

• Build to delight: shape how progression, performance standards, evaluation and reward actually work at tem, alongside the rest of the Performance team. We treat our people like top athletes, and our aim is to delight them at every step of their employee experience - the systems around them have to express that at every contact point.

• Design for our shape, not the textbook: we index on outcomes and impact in everything - how progression works, how teams are structured, what leaders spend their time on. Most standard people frameworks assume a management hierarchy we don't have.

• Automate the repeatable: use AI and automation so the operational layer runs itself and your time goes on judgement, not process.

• Think in process, scalability and iteration: turn recurring employee and manager pain points into better processes, tools, guidance or self-service. Measure whether they work and redesign when they don't fit the purpose.

✅ Requirements

You do not need a CIPD qualification, and you do not need to have worked in a large, established HR function. You might have been a founder's associate or Chief of Staff at a Series A or B startup, holding the place together while it scaled. You might have built a People function from scratch and taken it from a one-person band to a well-oiled machine. You might have run a team or an Operations function where the people calls were effectively yours, even if People or HR never appeared in your job title. Or you might have done a different job that helped you build the skills below. A background in HR might help you do this job well, but it is not a requirement.

Must-Haves

• You've held real accountability for decisions on people - you've partnered with leaders, or managed a team yourself, where hiring, performance and exit calls were either yours or made on your guidance.

• You can be trusted with the hardest conversations in the business and you're recognised for how you handle them, and you understand how decisions about people shape culture and employer brand - balancing efficiency with empathy.

• You've worked in or towards building a high-performance culture, and you're a confident challenger who carries conviction and can influence leadership decisions.

• You're comfortable operating without a playbook, in a company where the requirements and the shape of your role change constantly.

• You think from first principles, get to the root cause of complex problems, weigh competing considerations and anticipate second-order consequences.

• You're fluent with Notion, automation and AI tooling - your instinct is to build the thing rather than do it manually a second time - and you write clearly enough that a busy person reads it once and comes away with a clear idea of the situation and the next actions.

Desirable

• Employment relations experience in the UK, Europe or the US - we operate across the UK and Europe today, with plans to expand to the US soon.

• Experience working across multiple countries, including employer of record arrangements.

• Compensation and benchmarking experience - salary banding, pay review cycles, market data.

🎁 Benefits & Perks

• 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.

• Up to GBP1,200 or EUR1,400 per year for your remote setup.

• Up to GBP150 or EUR170 per month for wellbeing.

🤝 Interview Process

We move fast. Most processes take 2 to 3 weeks from first chat to offer. If you need us to adapt anything, let us know.

• Intro call with our Talent team.

• Skills interview, which might include a practical exercise we may ask you to prepare in advance.

• Hiring Manager interview.

• Bar Raiser interview with leadership stakeholders.

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.