Primer
Engineering Manager - Orchestration
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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 >
What team will you be joining?
A Primer payment is worth so much more than a regular payment.
In the Orchestration team we build the engine that powers intelligent, seamless, and reliable payments — across any provider, method, or market. We own the full orchestration layer: routing decisions, fallback logic, and the smart infrastructure that makes every payment perform at its best.
This team covers everything from checkout and payment processing through to tokenization, authentication, fallback logic, developer tooling, and workflows.
What will you be doing?
- Lead a cross-functional team spanning frontend, mobile and backend, helping engineers grow beyond their original specialism and supporting them as they pick up unfamiliar parts of the stack
- Own 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
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What We're Looking For
- Comfortable leading a cross-functional team. Either you've managed engineers across frontend, mobile and backend before, or you're genuinely open to it and to ramping up on the parts of the stack you know less well
- 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
- Direct experience managing full-stack or cross-functional teams across both frontend and backend
- 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
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 access to co-working spaces across most major cities.
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 across major cities
- 📅 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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Jessica, London
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