Engineering Manager

An Introduction to Primer

Primer is the world's first unified payment infrastructure, founded by former leaders of Braintree and PayPal. We unify fragmented payment and finance systems into a single, intelligent platform, automating the entire payments lifecycle from acceptance and orchestration to reconciliation, FX, and financial operations.

Trusted by leading merchants worldwide, we give finance, payments, and engineering teams the tools to move faster, reduce complexity, and unlock growth. Our open, modular platform connects to 150+ services across the payments ecosystem, while our expanding CFO product suite brings unified reconciliation, FX management, and financial visibility across markets and currencies.

Backed by Accel, Balderton, ICONIQ, and Tencent, we're setting a new standard for how the world moves money.

What will you be doing?

• Lead a team of engineers owning a defined area of software architecture, taking responsibility for delivery, quality, and technical direction
• Run an effective development process: sprint health, delivery cadence, incident response, postmortems, and a sustainable on-call rotation that doesn't burn people out
• Grow the engineers on your team through regular feedback, performance conversations, and stretch assignments that actually move people forward
• Work closely with product to scope initiatives, identify risks, and prioritise deliverables, giving clear heads-up when capacity is constrained
• Stay close enough to your team's technical work to ask the right questions, spot risks early, and contribute meaningfully to design discussions without becoming a bottleneck
• Define the right metrics for your team's systems, use them to explain performance, catch variance, and drive improvements before they become incidents
• Handle the difficult conversations, whether that's performance issues, interpersonal friction, or delivery risk, before they become problems that need escalating

What we're looking for

• A background as a software engineer, with hands-on experience building and shipping production systems. This is a hard requirement.
• Experience managing a team of engineers, with a track record of building effective development processes and growing individual contributors
• Technically credible enough to evaluate design decisions, challenge assumptions, and be taken seriously by strong engineers, without needing to be the most technical person in the room
• Comfortable with operational ownership: on-call culture, incident management, postmortems, and the unglamorous work of keeping systems healthy
• Clear, direct communication with stakeholders and leadership, including knowing when and how to escalate and when not to
• Able to operate with meaningful autonomy: you don't need a playbook for every situation, but you know when to ask for one

Nice to have:

• Experience in fintech, payments, or a similarly regulated and high-stakes technical domain
• Familiarity with distributed systems and the trade-offs that come with high-throughput, high-availability infrastructure

You may not like it here

• You'll be expected to run your team largely independently, with support available from a Senior EM but without hand-holding. If you need the path to be clear and the decisions made above you, this will be frustrating.
• Primer is remote-first and always will be. There's no office to fall back on, and managing remotely well is a core part of the job, not an asterisk.
• The pace is real. Priorities shift, context changes, and the expectation is that you adapt without losing the thread on delivery or team health.
• Your engineers are strong, and they'll notice quickly if you're not keeping up with the technical domain. This is not a role where you can manage from distance.

✅ Our interview process

• 30 minute call with a Talent Partner
• 60 minute interview with an Engineering Manager
• 90 minute coding interview in Python
• 90 minute system design interview
• 60 minute final stage values-alignment interview

What’s the culture like at Primer?

We’ve been recognised as a top global employer, #1 in FinTech for ‘flexibility’!

Our 2025 Product Showcase

We’re building a culture where people can come and do their best work and enjoy it. We want our people to be proud of the impact that they have at Primer, and of the work that they are doing. You will be working with a team of people who are mission-driven, smart, and reflective, and who are invested in building exceptional products and delivering success for our merchants (and we also know how to have fun along the way).

We work remotely. We believe that building a successful, profitable company goes beyond proximity. We invest in our relationships with each other through great remote working practices and thoughtfully designed face-to-face time together. Our heads-together time comes in the form of workstations, our annual company retreat, and co-working space access worldwide.

Finally, let’s go ahead and say it. The work that we do is challenging. Startups are a challenge, building category defining products is a challenge. You should be prepared for a challenge at Primer. But, there’s a big difference between a challenge and a struggle. The key difference is that the right challenge comes with the right support structures, an acceptance that not everything always goes to plan, a collaborative environment, and a great team around you. It’s never a challenge that you will face alone.

Our benefits

🌍 We are fully remote and globally distributed; and have been since day one

💰 Competitive share options

🌴 Uncapped holiday, with 25 days minimum to be taken

🗣️ Co-working space access

📅 Workations & Company Retreat

💻 The best equipment for your role

🏠 £500 towards your home office setup

🔎 Generous learning budget

🏥 Private Medical Insurance

📈 A broad set of additional perks and benefits ( depending on location)

Don’t meet every single requirement?

At Primer, we’re dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply. You may be the right candidate for this or other roles. Primer is committed to the equal treatment of all current and prospective employees, regardless of background or beliefs.

Primer adopts a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination. We are committed to providing equal opportunities to all current and prospective employees regardless of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.