Lead Talent Partner - Engineering

Primer

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 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. 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.

Primer

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 WILL YOU BE DOING? * Own the operating model for the full product organisation: planning cadences, roadmap governance, OKR cycles, and the rituals that keep a distributed, senior team aligned without drowning them in process * Define how Primer measures product performance across the portfolio — build the instrumentation, the dashboards, and the feedback loops that give leadership clarity on what is shipping, what is slipping, and what it means for the business * Set the strategy and direction for product tooling: what the team uses, how it integrates, and how it evolves as the company scales from Series C to a much larger organisation * Lead go-to-market readiness across the product function — coordinating across Product, Engineering, Commercial, and Marketing to ensure launches land with the right preparation and the right people informed * Identify and resolve systemic friction across the product org, not one-off fixes but durable structural changes that remove the same class of problem from recurring * Build the knowledge infrastructure for the product function: documentation standards, onboarding, decision records, and shared frameworks that mean institutional knowledge survives people leaving and scales with hiring * Act as a strategic partner to Theo, owning the operational detail and the cross-functional coordination that lets him stay focused on product direction WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR * Substantial experience in a senior Product Operations, Chief of Staff, or equivalent role inside a B2B technology company — you have built or significantly rebuilt a product operating model before * Genuine analytical capability: you can work directly with data, build dashboards, and turn numbers into clear narratives without depending on a data team to do it for you * Track record of creating systems and processes that people actually adopt and maintain over time — you know the difference between documentation and infrastructure * Comfortable operating across Product, Engineering, and GTM without a clear lane — you influence through the quality of your thinking and the usefulness of what you build * Multi-quarter strategic thinking: you can hold the big picture of how the product function should operate in eighteen months while executing in the present * Highly autonomous in ambiguous environments — you do not need the problem to be fully defined before you start making progress on it * Nice to have: experience in payments, fintech, or developer-facing infrastructure products ✅ 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. 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.

Primer

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? 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. ✅ 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. 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.