Director of Engineering

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.

You’ll be the Engineering leader for the multi-team Orchestration organization. The services owned by 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.

What we're looking for:

• Experience leading multiple engineering teams through significant growth or technical transformation.
• A track record of managing and developing engineering managers.
• Experience running multi-team domains.
• 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.
• Comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical altitude.
• Ability to work productively and collaboratively with other functions.
• Ability to communicate effectively with executive stakeholders.

Nice to have:

• Experience with payments.
• Experience owning merchant-facing APIs and SDKs.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and distributed databases.

You may not like it here if:

• You enjoy working in an office-setting; we are remote-first and always will be!
• You are not comfortable with shifting context and navigating ambiguity.

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 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.

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.

Finally, let’s go ahead and say it. The work that we do is challenging. Scaleups 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.

Our benefits:

• We are fully remote and globally distributed.
• 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.

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.