Manager, Engineering

Job title: Manager, Engineering - Merchant Capabilities

Reports to: Director, Engineering

Department: Central Services

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada/United States

About Priority: 

Priority Commerce is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority Commerce, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

What you'll own

The Merchant Capabilities team owns MX Merchant, the product merchants use to run the money side of their business every day: payments, terminals, invoices, payment links, customers, card vaults, recurring billing, receipts, reporting, and the sign-in and account experience around it all.

What you'll be building

We’re modernizing MX Merchant from the front door. That means seamless sign-in with passkeys and trusted devices, PCI security, new self-serve account settings, and the next generation of payment links built on the embedded checkout widget.

How we work

Engineers own their work from pull requests through QA handover and release. QA engineers drive regression and risk, and an SDET owns the automation platform that checks our flows at scale. AI-assisted development is part of how we build. We share our own AI skills for things like release documentation, and we ship in two-week sprints with regular demos.

Who you’ll work with

Full-stack engineers working across the .NET and Node.js codebases. They’re led by an engineering manager who owns the domain, and supported by dedicated QA engineers, an SDET, and embedded product managers and design. You’ll also partner closely with the Commerce Engine, Core Platform, and Customer Care teams.

The role

One team (or a few) — its delivery, its people, its standards — performs because you own all of it, full time. You'll manage one to several teams as a full-time craft; the team's performance is your contribution, and the leverage flows through judgment, hiring, coaching, standards, and the conditions you create, not your own commits. You can still pick up the keyboard when the work genuinely calls for it — you just won't lean on it as your contribution.

Responsibilities: 

Craft — Hiring, feedback, and performance management operate as a system, not events: the bar is consistent, the assessments are honest, and underperformance is addressed early and directly. Can interrogate a design and hold the technical bar in any conversation — and the team's senior engineer would say so. AI-native practice is a team standard with expectations, not an encouraged option.

Impact — The team delivers predictably and sustainably; commitments to product, design, and business partners hold, and they're trusted because they keep holding. The team's outcomes — the metrics it exists to move — move on the manager's watch, in partnership with their Product and Design peers. The team is instrumented through the company's engineering management platform — the outcomes it exists to move, the paired delivery-and-quality signals beneath them (a speed signal only counts when its quality pair held), and the activity beneath those — and improves on what it measures, with the fix nameable. A metric that improved while its outcome didn't is a flag, not a win.

Ownership — Owns the team's operational health: ensures SLO coverage exists for the team's services and is honored, deploy frequency and lead time improve, on-call stays humane, and the team never ships untested work downstream as someone else's problem. During high-pressure moments, orchestrates the response — outward communication, decision-making, protecting the team's ability to recover — owns the response and ensures it's led well. They actively identify the team's single points of failure — including themselves — and close them: named shadows, deliberate rotation, documented knowledge.

Influence — Engineers grow into and beyond their levels. Some grow past the manager, into roles the manager championed. Measured on the team's outcomes alongside the team's senior engineer, each through their own lever: the manager owns delivery, people, and conditions; the senior engineer owns technical direction — respected and amplified, never overridden.

Judgment — Knows when to protect the team and when to push it; when to pick up the keyboard and when doing so would steal the growth moment; which battles to escalate and which to absorb. Debt and platform work get real roadmap space because the manager makes the tradeoff explicit rather than silently mortgaging the future.

What Success Looks Like:

You'll be succeeding when commitments hold quarter after quarter, your hires raise the bar, an underperformance case was handled early and fairly, engineers you developed now operate a level up — and no part of the team's operation depends on a single head — including yours.

Candidate Requirements:

• Experience managing engineers full time — hiring, performance, and delivery accountability.

• Sufficient technical depth to hold the bar in design reviews, incidents, and roadmap debates.

• Typically ~7+ years of experience including people leadership — a guide, never a gate.

• Strong technical background in .NET systems and Node.js/JavaScript applications, sufficient to evaluate designs and operational health (data-access performance, messaging, resilience).

• Experience managing legacy modernization as a delivery program (.NET Framework to modern .NET).

• Fluency in the operational side of the stack: API contracts, Kafka, observability, reliability patterns.

• Experience running hiring processes for .NET and Node.js engineers and maintaining a high technical bar.

• Experience partnering effectively with senior technical leaders (Staff+ engineer).

Nice to Have

• Advanced degree (Master's or PhD) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related quantitative field; a specialization or applied experience in AI/ML is a plus.

• Prior individual-contributor experience as a Senior or Staff .NET engineer.

What’s Preferred

• Experience in payments, banking, or another regulated financial-services domain — systems that move money, store cardholder data, or touch card network/ACH rails.

• Familiarity with PCI DSS (especially audit-trail, logging, and access-control requirements) or adjacent frameworks like SOC 2 Type II and SOX IT general controls (change management, access reviews, log retention).

• Experience with fraud detection, chargebacks/disputes, reconciliation, or AML/KYC systems.

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation and Benefits: $175K-$210K USD, $144K-$187K CAD

Compensation range:
We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs

• 401(k) match

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)

• HSA and FSA options

• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Health & Well-being

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage

• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health

• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot

• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement

• Leadership development programs

• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.

• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.

• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.