Dispute Operations Specialist

Job description

**About Us** Tamara is a leading fintech platform in Saudi Arabia and the GCC region with a mission to help people own their dreams built on being simple, trusted, and everywhere our customers need us. Today, more than 25 million customers and over 130,000 partner merchants depend on Tamara every day for reliable financial solutions across retail, travel, education, healthcare, and beyond. Tamara is backed by Sanabil Investments, a wholly owned company of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), and SNB Capital, among others. **Role summary** Dispute Operations Investigators are the operational engine of Tamara's newly established Dispute Operations function. Reporting to the Team Leader, this role handles the case-level operational work of dispute resolution: exception review, evidence adjudication, merchant communication, and recovery coordination. This is a hands-on operational role. As Tamara's dispute automation matures through 2026-2027, this role shifts from high-volume case handling to exception-focused work (fraud-flagged cases, regulator escalations, complex adjudications). Investigators who develop strong judgment on exception handling and merchant communication have a direct pathway to Team Leader within the function, or broader roles in Care Operations. **Key responsibilities** Own the end-to-end management of merchant disputes, including: **Review & Adjudication** - Review claims through the standard queue or the commercial channel when a merchant is suspended due to a high dispute rate and requires priority handling. - Evaluate the evidence provided by both the customer and merchant. - Adjudicate the claim based on the available evidence and applicable policies. - Escalate to T&S or Team Leader per defined escalation criteria. - ● Maintain <48-hour SLA on manual review queue **Merchant Engagement & Dispute Rate Management** - Proactively communicate with merchants to urge timely action on their claims. - Guide merchants on how to action claims when support is required. - Engage merchants with high dispute rates and request a clear action plan to improve their dispute performance. **Negative Balance Collection – Planned** - Support the collection of merchant negative balances once the process and ownership model are finalized. - This responsibility is currently being scoped and will be incorporated into the role once the process is defined. **Channel partner workflow support** - Handle CP-flagged disputes per defined manual workflow - Coordinate with Commercial KAMs on partner-specific escalations **Regulator escalation coordination (designated Investigators only)** One Investigators is designated within the team as the primary regulator escalation point: - Handles SAMA and CBUAE escalated cases in coordination with Gov Esc team and legal. - Drafts responses to regulator queries within SAMA 5-business-day escalation SLA - Maintains regulator escalation log and reports monthly to team leader **Reporting** - Daily case throughput reporting - Weekly quality review on adjudication decisions - Surface operational patterns and improvement opportunities to Team Leader **What we're looking for** **Experience** - 2-3 years operational experience in customer care, claims handling, dispute management, chargeback operations, or comparable high-volume case work - Fintech, BNPL, payments, or e-commerce background preferred - Fluent Arabic and English (customer and merchant communication) **Strengths** - **Detail-orientated:** strong case notes, accurate decisioning, clean audit trail - **Comfortable with high volume:** able to work through case queues at pace without quality degradation ● **Judgement:** comfortable making adjudication calls with incomplete evidence - **Customer and merchant communication:** professional written communication in both English and Arabic - **Systems literacy:** Salesforce or comparable case management platform **Preferred** - Prior experience with Tamara systems (CSHub, Salesforce, Partner Portal) - Familiarity with the SAMA regulatory framework for consumer finance / BNPL — required for the designated regulator escalation investigators. - Experience with reserve or settlement operations