Primer.io
Director of Engineering
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An Introduction to Primer
Primer is the unified infrastructure for global payments. We give finance and payments teams the visibility and control to reduce complexity, improve performance, and capture more revenue - all from a single platform.
Backed by Sofina, Peak XV Partners, ICONIQ, Tencent, Accel, and Balderton, we're building the payments layer the world's best companies rely on.
- Watch our showcase >
- Read up on our $100m Series C
- Learn more about our culture >
Which team will you be joining?
You’ll be the Engineering leader for the multi-team Orchestration organization. The services owned Orchestration power our core payments products - every payment that flows through the platform passes through Orchestration's code. The systems here handle merchant checkout, transaction routing, processor integrations, merchant-facing APIs, and the supporting infrastructure that keeps the whole processing pipeline running at scale. The security, reliability and scalability of these systems is non-negotiable and a top priority.
This is not a role where you inherit a stable, mature organisation and keep it running. We're in a period of rapid growth and architectural evolution, across the core service architecture, new product capabilities (including Agentic Commerce), and ambitious reliability targets. You'll need to drive significant technical change while keeping a high-throughput production system running flawlessly.
You'll report directly to the CTO and lead a multi-team organization, with (Senior) Staff Engineers and (Senior) Engineering Managers reporting directly to you.
What will you be doing?
- Be accountable for the org's overall performance, culture, and output
- Own the technical roadmap for Orchestration in partnership with Product, balancing new product work against tech debt paydown and the reality of running a high-throughput system in parallel
- Partner with the CTO to shape how the Orchestration domain evolves as Primer scales — where the boundaries sit, how complexity gets managed, where investment needs to go
- Holding and raising the bar on security, reliability and latency, not as a one-off effort but as an ongoing operational standard
- Develop the engineering leaders within Orchestration: coaching (S)EMs and (Senior) Staff Engineers, raising the ceiling on what the leadership layer can do, and identifying who the next leaders will be
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What we're looking for
- Experience leading multiple engineering teams through significant growth or technical transformation — you know what it takes to move an org through a step-change without losing the people or the product
- A track record of managing and developing engineering managers — you have built and raised the ceiling on an EM layer, not just managed individual contributors. You know how to operate through a leadership layer, not around it.
- Experience running multi-team domains — coordinating across subteams with different concerns, keeping them aligned without creating a centralisation bottleneck
- Experience running multi-tenant, high-scale, low-latency, high-reliability systems
- Demonstrated ability to deliver large-scale architectural evolutions while keeping a production system running — ideally in a multi-tenant, high-throughput environment
- Comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical altitude in the same week — 6-to-12 month roadmap thinking one morning, production incident response the same afternoon
- Ability to work productively and collaboratively with other functions - Product, GTM, Finance etc
- Ability to communicate effectively with executive stakeholders
Nice to have:
- Experience with payments
- Experience owning merchant-facing APIs and SDKs that span backend, frontend, and mobile domains.
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, SQS/SNS) and distributed databases (e.g. CockroachDB, DynamoDB)
✅ A typical interview process
- An initial intro call with a Talent Partner
- An interview with the Hiring Manager
- Challenge Stage - Contextualised to the role
- A final, values-alignment interview
What's the culture like at Primer?
We're building a culture where people can do their best work and be proud of the impact they have. You'll be working with people who are mission-driven, smart, and reflective, and who are genuinely invested in building exceptional products and delivering success for our merchants.
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We work remotely, and have done since day one. We believe that building a successful, profitable company goes beyond proximity. We invest in our relationships through great remote working practices and thoughtfully designed face-to-face time, including workations, our annual company retreat, and co-working space access worldwide.
The work is challenging. Scaleups are a challenge, and building category-defining products is a challenge. But there's a meaningful difference between a challenge and a struggle. At Primer, the right challenge comes with the right support: strong onboarding, a collaborative environment, and a team that is genuinely invested in your success. It's never something you 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 experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification listed, 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 and adopts a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination, regardless of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other background or belief.
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