Operations Manager — Payments

About Dwelly

Dwelly — a UK-based, AI-enabled lettings and property management platform, that is growing through a roll-up strategy acquiring estate agencies. The company leverages two arms: i) acquiring existing letting agencies, effectively buying its highly sticky, recurring revenue-type landlords portfolios, and then ii) building a top-notch technology to automate tenant management, payments, and post-rental property maintenance. The company seamlessly integrates AI services to automate all business processes within brick-and-mortar real estate agencies, integrating them into a tech-enabled digital letting platform in two months to radically improve the user experiences and increase efficiency of the business.

We’re a fast-growing, product-focused company, backed by top-tier investors and led by a team with deep experience in real estate, technology, and operations.

Position Summary

You’ll operationally run our payments team day-to-day. You’ll line-manage several teams of finance admins across our agencies, own SLAs and processing accuracy, run the arrears process, and be the escalation point for anything payments-related. You’ll partner closely with our Head of Payments, who’s focused on building the next generation of payments automations and products. Your job is to make sure the existing operation runs cleanly — so the building can keep happening. This is a hands-on operator role. Your week is dashboards, 1:1s with team leads, calls about edge cases, ensuring SOPs adoption.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Team Performance & Delivery
Own the day-to-day performance of finance admin teams across agencies, including SLAs, processing accuracy, arrears, and adherence to operational playbooks. Ensure teams are consistently delivering against clear performance standards.

2. Processing Accuracy & Controls
Drive payment processing errors towards zero by implementing strong QA processes, exception tracking, and feedback loops. Ensure issues are identified early, root-caused effectively, and translated into training or process improvements.

3. People Management & Development
Lead, coach, and develop a team of coordinators and finance admins. Set clear scorecards, manage performance, support hiring, and build a strong, scalable team structure across multiple locations.

4. Escalations & Cross-Functional Coordination
Act as the first point of escalation for complex payment issues, including landlord/tenant disputes, bank discrepancies, and supplier challenges. Partner closely with other Operations Managers, Heads of Ops, and the UK GM to ensure smooth coordination across verticals and consistent performance across agencies.

Qualifications & Preferred Background:

• 5+ years of experience in payments or finance operations at scale
• Direct line management experience of 20–30+ people, ideally across multiple sites
• Experience in fast-growing, operationally intensive environments (multi-site / multi-branch)
• Proven track record of managing teams against SLAs using dashboards and clear KPIs
• Strong Excel and BI skills
• Comfortable acting as an escalation point for complex or sensitive payment issues

Preferred:

• Experience in lettings, property management, or another regulated client-money environment
• Alternatively, strong transferable experience from fintech operations, payroll, or shared services finance
• Experience scaling teams through high growth (e.g. 5x+ YoY)

Nice to have:

• AAT / ACCA / CIMA (part-qualified or qualified)
• Exposure to RPA, low-code tools, or scripting — able to partner with teams on automation initiatives
• Strong leadership and coaching capability
• Calm, structured approach to problem-solving
• Clear communicator with stakeholders at all levels
• Process-driven mindset with a focus on building and enforcing SOPs
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, evolving environments

Compensation & Benefits:

• Competitive salary with the potential for equity options based on performance, recognising exceptional contributions to our integration success.

What is it like being a Dwell-er?

Feel free to check out Dwelly Core Principles. That’s about what we believe in, how we operate and make decisions.

What we offer is not a fancy office or a static workplace. Instead, this is solving one of worlds’ most complex problems in the largest consumer industry in the world (residential rentals), to improve the experience for >30% of households (>5M in the UK, and >100M including EU and US) that live in rental homes.

This is about disrupting the largest, most antiquated industry in the world, with one of the strongest operational and technical teams that exist in the UK and the EU. We work hard, and we shoot for extremely ambitious results. But we want people to be proud of what they’ve built and be able to look back and say one day “hell yeah, that was me that did it all”.

• Customer obsession rather than competitive focus
• Passion for invention
• Operational excellence
• Long-term thinking