Engineering Manager - Account Experience

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.

Which team will you be joining?

The merchant experience is only as good as the platform behind it. In the Account Experience team we build and own the full platform that merchants use to interact with Primer, from initial setup through to day‑to‑day operations, and increasingly through Primer AI Companion as a first‑class interface. The team covers Primer Companion, Merchant Account Setup, Monitors, Workflows, Auditing, and the cross‑cutting platform concerns that keep the merchant experience cohesive and consistent.

You’ll lead this team as its Engineering Manager: owning delivery, growth, and technical direction across that surface, reporting into engineering leadership and working alongside Product and your EM peers. It’s a genuinely broad remit at a point where the merchant platform is being reshaped around Companion, so the decisions you make about architecture, priorities, and how the team operates will define how thousands of merchants experience Primer day to day.

What will you be doing?

• Own delivery end to end for the Account Experience surface, holding the team to a consistent bar on quality, reliability, and pace without becoming the bottleneck yourself.
• Lead, coach, and grow the engineers on your team: career development, feedback, performance, and creating an environment where high‑calibre people do their best work.
• Stay technically credible. You’ll review design decisions, contribute to architecture discussions, and help engineers make sound trade‑offs on scalability, latency, and data integrity, rather than managing from a distance.
• Partner with Product to shape a realistic roadmap, surface risks early, and protect the team from over‑commitment while still moving fast.
• Drive operational excellence across systems handling real payment volume: monitoring, incident response, and high‑quality post‑mortems that actually close out their follow‑ups.
• Help shape how Primer Companion matures as a first‑class merchant interface, balancing new surface area against the platform you already own.
• Hire. As Primer scales through its Series C plan, building and calibrating a strong team is a core part of the job, not a side task.

What we’re looking for

• Experience managing a team of software engineers, with real accountability for their delivery, growth, and performance, not just coordination.
• Enough technical depth to be respected by strong engineers: you can interrogate a system design, spot the wrong trade‑off, and tell when the information you’ve been given doesn’t add up.
• A background building and operating backend or platform systems at scale, where reliability and correctness genuinely mattered.
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and little process: you resolve ambiguity rather than wait for it to be removed.
• The judgement to know when a change is significant enough to pull in Staff Engineers or trigger a design review, and the credibility to hold that line.

Nice to have:

• Exposure to payments, fintech, or other complex infrastructure domains, though depth of engineering leadership matters more than the specific industry.
• Experience building product surfaces backed by AI, given where Companion is heading.

You may not like it here

Primer is remote‑first. There’s no office to walk into for context or a read on how things are going, and that applies doubly when you’re the one your team looks to for direction. You are the escalation point. When something in your area breaks, it is your team’s problem to understand and fix, and ultimately yours to own. We keep the management layer thin. You won’t have a large support structure above you removing obstacles, and you’re expected to stay close enough to the technical work to lead it credibly. The platform you’re inheriting carries real complexity. You’ll be expected to deal with it thoughtfully and keep raising the bar, not work around it.

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 (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 workations, 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. 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. 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

• 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.