Finance & Accounting Lead

Tern spent years becoming the place travel advisors do their work. Now we're becoming part of how the industry actually transacts. This is an important bet, and if we get it right, the path to a genuinely large, successful business is clear. It only works if the books and the processes are right from day one—this is your job.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Restructure the P&L so it describes the businesses we actually run, with unit economics per transaction, and own the model that comes out of it.

• Set Tern's revenue recognition policy across all business verticals.

• Oversee the month-end close process.

• Own the burn: the policy, the categorization, and the gap between the P&L expense line and what actually leaves the bank.

• Write the accounting requirements our payment and operations products have to meet, and work with our Finance Product Lead and engineering to get them built.

• Map and close the tax exposure that comes with new business lines.

• Be the accounting SME for Tern internally and for our users.

WHAT YOU HAVE

• Deep accounting expertise: You've owned the technical accounting at a company where the answer wasn't in a playbook. You can reason from the standard rather than from precedent, and you're the person others come to when nobody knows how something should be booked.

• Built the function: You've been the first or earliest accounting hire at one or two startups. You built the chart of accounts, the close, and the controls rather than inheriting them.

• Revenue recognition judgment: You've made a gross-vs-net call under ASC 606 and lived with it, ideally at a company that was or became the merchant of record. You can reason through the principal-vs-agent test, not just recite it.

• Payments and marketplace accounting: You've accounted for money that flows through the company rather than to it—held funds, payouts, chargebacks, interchange, processing fees.

• Requirements writing: You've told an engineering team what the ledger needs and had it built. You can hold that line without needing to own the roadmap.

• Close ownership: You can spot a wrong close by looking at it. You've owned month-end, not just reviewed the output.

• Pace: You operate without a defined process and without waiting for one. You pick up unowned work.

BONUS POINTS

• Travel tech experience, or any industry where commissions, supplier statements, and trust accounting are normal.

• A CPA certification.

• You've been part of an institutional fundraise and know what diligence does to a set of books.

• You've replaced an outsourced bookkeeping firm and brought the function in-house.

• Multi-entity or multi-currency experience.