Software Engineer III, Backend - Orchestration

Backend Engineer L3

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. We're building the payments layer the world's best companies rely on.

Which team will you be joining?

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.

As a Backend Engineer L3 you will work within a small, high-calibre team of engineers who own their work end to end. You'll report into the Engineering Manager for Orchestration and contribute to systems that handle real payment volume at scale.

What will you be doing?

• Take full ownership of backend features from scoping through to production, keeping the team informed on progress, risks, and blockers without being chased.
• Design and deliver backend services that handle real payment volume, with a strong focus on reliability, performance, and correctness at scale.
• Contribute to architecture discussions, bring proposals to the engineering council, and advocate for clear service contracts and simple, maintainable system design.
• Monitor the production impact of your own work, identify issues early, and drive incidents to resolution when they arise.
• Write code that your peers consider high quality: production-ready, well-considered on error paths, and built with the next engineer in mind.
• Actively contribute to Primer's engineering standards, raise concerns when you see gaps, and help the team hold a consistent bar.
• Collaborate with engineers across the Orchestration team on scoping sessions, code reviews, and technical decisions that shape how the system evolves.

What we're looking for

• Solid backend engineering experience, with the ability to take ambiguous requirements and deliver working, production-ready software with minimal direction.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: you understand why things fail in production and you build accordingly.
• Comfortable working with REST APIs and the patterns that make services reliable, observable, and easy to reason about.
• Experience owning work end to end — not just writing code but thinking about monitoring, rollout, and what happens after deployment.
• The confidence to contribute to architecture discussions, ask the right questions, and push back when a design decision doesn't make sense.
• Experience in a payments, fintech, or infrastructure context is a plus, though depth of engineering matters more than the specific industry.

You may not like it here

• Primer is remote-first. There is no office to fall back on when you want context, direction, or a sense of how things are going. You need to be good at operating without those signals.
• We do not over-engineer our processes. If something is unclear, you're expected to resolve that ambiguity yourself rather than wait for someone to remove it.
• The Orchestration codebase is not simple. You will inherit technical complexity and will be expected to deal with it thoughtfully, not just 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 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.

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 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.