Manager, Engineering - Innovation Studio
Job title: Manager, Engineering - Innovation Studio
Reports to: Director, Engineering
Department: Development
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
About Product & Technology at Priority:
Our vision in Product & Technology is to engineer the world's most resilient, AI-native financial ecosystem that empowers businesses to transcend table-stakes and lead the agentic future, where every financial transaction is intelligent, every developer is accelerated, and every experience is unified.
At Priority, we are building the Priority Commerce Engine, a unified platform that enables businesses to collect money, store money, lend money, move money, and build modern commerce experiences at scale.
About the Role:
This role is focused on leading a high-performing engineering team to deliver scalable, reliable, and high-impact solutions across three core areas: customer-facing AI innovation, AI-driven risk and fraud, and AI-enabled operational efficiency.
You will lead efforts to prototype and productionize AI-powered capabilities that enhance Priority’s products and deliver meaningful value to customers. This includes rapidly developing and validating new ideas, then partnering with product and engineering teams to bring successful concepts into production. You will also drive the application of AI to improve fraud detection and risk management systems, building solutions that increase accuracy, reduce false positives, and adapt to evolving threats. In parallel, you will help the organization adopt AI to improve how we build and operate the platform, including developer experience, product workflows, and broader business functions.
Engineering Managers at Priority own a team — and sometimes more than one team, when scope allows — completely, as a full-time craft. The team is your product. Engineers' growth is your deliverable. Where the Team Lead leads partly through personal technical contribution, the Manager leads through the team's performance — what they ship, how they grow, how they handle the pressure when it comes. The leverage flows through judgment, hiring, coaching, standards, the partnerships you build, and the conditions you create — not your own commits.
Managers don't manage other managers — that's the Senior Manager differentiator. You may run one team or several teams directly, but every engineer under you reports to you (or to a Team Lead who reports to you), not to a Manager who reports to you. Your job is the team(s) themselves and every person on them.
You hold a Staff-level technical bar in any conversation without writing the code yourself. You can interrogate a design, challenge a tradeoff, and tell whether the right rigor is being applied to a critical decision. You'll pick up the keyboard when the work genuinely calls for it — a critical investigation, a vacation backfill, a moment when no one else can move it — but you don't lean on it as your contribution. Your contribution is what the team delivers.
You own three bars with conviction: the hiring bar — every hire raises the team's level, or it doesn't get made; the performance bar — growth is celebrated, underperformance is addressed early and directly, the hard conversations happen before they're crises; the culture bar — psychological safety, honest debate, and quality-is-everyone's-job are team properties you build, not hope for.
You own the team's business, customer, and OKR/KPI alignment — in partnership with your peers at this level in Product Design and Product Management. You and your Product Design and Product Management peers are a trio. Together you own the team's OKRs and KPIs as commitments the business plans on — not aspirational statements to be revised when things get hard. You represent the team's work outward in customer and business terms — to product, to leadership, to peers, to stakeholders. And the "why" is visible in every OKR review, every design review, every retro on your team. Your engineers can defend the value of what they're building to any audience because you built that muscle in them.
You and the team's Staff (or Senior Staff) Software Engineer — or the team's Software Architect (who sits at the Senior Staff SE level) — share accountability for the team's customer and business outcomes — the KPIs the team is on the hook for. (Multi-team Managers hold this shared-accountability partnership with each team's Staff+ engineer.) You lead through delivery, the people, the team, and the partnership with the Staff+ engineer needed to move those outcomes. They lead through architecture, technical direction, and engineering excellence. Two interlocking roles — you make the team deliver, they make it deliver the right things, built well — and the team needs both.
You own the team's contribution to the workstream's Engineering Maturity Model (EMM) score: you run the semi-annual Skills & Knowledge Assessment for every engineer on the team, the scores roll up into the workstream score, and you're accountable for moving them. You also own SLO coverage for the team's services, the humaneness of the on-call rotation, and the team's deploy frequency and lead time — the management work that doesn't show up on any sprint but determines whether the team is sustainable.
When the team hits a high-pressure moment — a major incident, a cross-functional escalation, a critical delivery — you're the leader the team looks to. You may not be the engineer closest to the code anymore, but you're the one orchestrating the response, making the calls, owning the communication outward, and protecting the team's ability to recover. You stay on it until it's resolved, regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend. The hours don't matter; the outcome does.
You drive the team's AI-native transformation. AI-assisted development is a team standard with clear proficiency expectations; the Agentic PDLC is operational on your team because you measured it, coached toward it, and held the bar.
Developing engineers is the primary multiplier of the job. Engineers in the room get better because of you — some of them leave for promotions you championed, including ones outside your team. That's success, not loss.
What You’ll Do:
Own the team completely — delivery, health, hiring, performance, culture, and the growth of every engineer; management as the whole job, not a layer on top of IC work (typically one team; sometimes multiple teams when scope allows).
Hold the three bars (hiring, performance, culture) with conviction; have the hard conversations early, before they're crises.
Hire engineers and own the bar — every hire raises the team's level, or it doesn't get made.
Manage performance honestly across the full team; the team is your most valuable system to debug and improve.
In partnership with your peers at this level in Product Design and Product Management, own the team's understanding of the customer, the business, and the OKRs and KPIs the team is measured on as commitments the business plans on.
Represent the team's work outward in customer and business terms — to product, to leadership, to peers, to stakeholders; make sure your engineers can defend the value of what they're building to any audience.
Set goals and OKRs together with your Product Design and Product Management peers; allocate team capacity deliberately; keep sprint predictability measured and stable; the commitments the team makes to its business partners, stakeholders, and customers hold.
Run the semi-annual Skills & Knowledge Assessment for every engineer — scores roll up into the workstream Engineering Maturity Model (EMM) score, so this is real, not paperwork.
Hold a Staff-level technical bar in conversations without writing the code yourself; partner with the team's Staff (or Senior Staff) Software Engineer — or Software Architect — as the shared-accountability partner for outcomes, without overriding their architectural ownership.
Lead during the team's high-pressure moments — major incidents, cross-functional escalations, critical deliveries — orchestrating the response, owning the outward communication, regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.
Own SLO coverage for the team's services (including data-integrity and freshness); keep on-call humane and rotations resilient; no critical system or responsibility depends on one person; the team never ships untested work to QE as someone else's problem.
Set and hold the team's AI-assisted development bar — daily practice with clear proficiency expectations — and bring the Agentic PDLC into how the team actually works.
Defend the team's developer experience with data — friction gets into planning, not absorbed; give technical-debt work real roadmap space.
Make sure the team's interfaces and pipelines hold to the standards the Staff+ engineer sets — versioned, documented, contract-tested; security scanning gates that matter, findings fixed within agreed timelines.
Develop the Staff+ bench from within the team — engineers grow into and beyond their levels because of you.
What Success Looks Like:
The team delivers predictably and sustainably; the commitments the team makes to its business partners, stakeholders, and customers are trusted because the team keeps them.
Your hires raise the bar; underperformance is addressed before it's a crisis.
Engineers grow into and beyond their levels on your watch; some leave for promotions you championed.
The team's KPIs move on your watch — not just system metrics, but the customer and business outcomes the team is on the hook for.
Every engineer on the team can defend the value of what they're building to any audience — because you built that muscle in them.
You and your Product Design and Product Management peers operate as a real trio — no siloing, no throwing over the wall.
Your team's contribution to the workstream EMM score trends up year over year — because engineers actually moved on the 12 dimensions, not because you graded generously.
AI-native practice is daily and judgment-driven across the team; you don't have to nag for it.
The team has no single-human points of failure you haven't identified and mitigated — including you.
The team would perform for a month without you in the room.
What We’re Looking For:
Roughly 8–12 years of relevant engineering experience, with a strong engineering foundation and demonstrated team leadership — a guide, not a gate; we hire on demonstrated impact, not years.
Experience in Payments or Banking domain is preferred, but experience in at least one of these areas is required.
A track record running a team end-to-end where management was the full-time craft — including making hiring, performance, and team-shape decisions with real consequences.
Staff-level technical depth — enough to challenge a design, interrogate a tradeoff, and hold the bar in any conversation without writing the code yourself.
Demonstrated partnership with Product and Design peers as a real trio — not a translator, not a gatekeeper; joint ownership of customer and business outcomes and the OKRs and KPIs the team commits to.
Comfort and credibility leading in high-pressure moments — outages, escalations, critical deliveries — regardless of hour, with the orchestration discipline that doesn't require being the engineer closest to the code.
A measurement mindset (delivery, quality, OKRs, KPIs) and a track record of partnering with Staff+ engineers without overriding them.
A daily, judgment-driven AI-assisted development practice you can credibly coach toward.
Honest, direct communication — willing to have the hard conversations early.
Nice to Have:
A track record of measurably improving how engineering teams work at scale — visible gains in delivery, quality, developer experience, or on-call health that lasted past your tenure.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience.
Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline (e.g., Master's or PhD).
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 & Benefits:
Compensation Range: $141k - $183k CAD
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
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.