Engineering Manager - Partners

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?

Primer's power grows every time a new partner plugs in, and the Partners team is what makes that possible at scale.

In the Partners team we build the platform that lets third parties unlock Primer's unified payments infrastructure and use it as a foundation for their own growth. We're building the app store for payments: a scalable, flexible ecosystem where partners discover, integrate, and distribute through Primer. The team covers the Partner Dashboard, Partner Integration Ownership and Management, Marketplace, Documentation and Samples, Payment and Workflow Integrations, and Nexus, the underlying integration framework that powers everything under the hood.

Partners runs as two sub-teams: Partner Experience, focused on the tools and interfaces that make Primer an easy and attractive platform for third parties to build on; and Integrations Core, focused on the technical frameworks that make integrations scalable, consistent, and maintainable.

You'll lead Partners as its Engineering Manager: owning delivery, growth, and technical direction across both sub-teams, reporting into engineering leadership and partnering closely with Product. It's a rare remit, because almost everything the team builds is consumed by external developers, so the bar for clarity, stability, and design is higher than usual. The decisions you make shape how an entire ecosystem builds on top of Primer.

What will you be doing?

• Own delivery end to end across Partner Experience and Integrations Core, holding both sub-teams to a consistent bar on quality and pace without becoming the bottleneck yourself.

• Lead, coach, and grow the engineers on your team: career development, feedback, performance, and building an environment where strong people do their best work.

• Stay technically credible. You'll review design decisions on the Nexus framework and the wider integration platform, evaluate trade-offs on scalability and maintainability, and tell when a design doesn't hold up.

• Treat external developers as first-class users. Much of what your team ships is public surface area, so you'll push for stable contracts, clear documentation, and changes that don't break the partners building on you.

• Partner with Product to shape a realistic roadmap across a broad surface, surface risks early, and protect the team from over-commitment.

• Drive operational excellence: monitoring, incident response, and post-mortems that genuinely close out their follow-ups, on systems that partners depend on.

• Hire. As Primer scales through its Series C plan, building and calibrating a strong team across both sub-teams 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 recognise when the information you've been given doesn't add up.

• A background building and operating platform, API, or integration-heavy systems, ideally ones consumed by developers outside your own company.

• 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:

• Experience with developer platforms, marketplaces, or ecosystem products where third parties build on what you ship.

• Exposure to payments, fintech, or other complex infrastructure domains, though depth of engineering leadership matters more than the specific industry.

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.

• Much of your team's work is in the hands of external partners. You won't control their timelines or their integrations, and a clean release can still surface problems you didn't cause but now have to help resolve.

• 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.

• You'll own a broad surface across two sub-teams with real underlying complexity. You're expected to deal with that thoughtfully and keep raising the bar, not work around it.

• 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

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.
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.

🌍 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)

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.