Staff Software Engineer

About CircleCI Engineering

At CircleCI, our engineering teams power the platform trusted by developers worldwide to build, test, and deploy with confidence. We operate at massive scale—processing over 50 million builds per month for companies ranging from fast-moving startups to global enterprises—and sit at a critical point in the software delivery lifecycle where reliability, performance, and user experience directly shape developer productivity.

Engineering here is about momentum and impact. We move quickly to explore ideas, validate what works, and double down on solutions that create real value for users. Our engineers are builders at heart: comfortable navigating ambiguity, making pragmatic tradeoffs, and approaching technical decisions through the lens of customer outcomes. Speed and experimentation matter, but so does the discipline to evolve prototypes into durable, production-ready systems.

Looking ahead, we’re weaving AI into the fabric of CI/CD—from intelligent test selection that reduces build times to predictive insights that prevent pipeline failures. By combining scale, speed, and intelligent tooling, the systems you build at CircleCI don’t just power our platform—they shape how software is delivered across the industry, helping teams everywhere ship better code, faster, with greater confidence.

Team-Agnostic Placement

We hire team-agnostically at CircleCI, meaning we don’t recruit for a single team from the start. Instead, we get to know each candidate through the interview process and then place them on the team where their strengths, interests, and experience will make the greatest impact. This approach allows us to be thoughtful about matching engineers with the right challenges, and it gives new hires a stronger foundation for long-term success and growth. It’s part of our commitment to building balanced, high-performing teams that are set up to thrive.

By carefully matching your skills to the right team, we ensure you can make the most meaningful impact on systems that are critical to the success of development teams worldwide.

What You'll Do:

• Architect, design, and lead the implementation of sophisticated distributed systems that address our most challenging technical problems and have company-wide impact.
• Write high-quality, maintainable Go code as part of delivering strategic systems, setting the standard for engineering excellence across the team.
• Depending on the team, your work may span backend services, AI-powered platforms, or customer-facing interfaces. You’ll apply your expertise wherever it can have the greatest impact.
• Drive technical vision within your team while influencing architecture decisions across your domain, establishing patterns and practices that become standards throughout the organization.
• Identify and solve systemic issues that span multiple components or services, developing architectural solutions that provide significant improvements to scalability, reliability, or developer experience.
• Depending on the team, your work may span backend, AI-powered systems, or developer-facing interfaces. You’ll apply your expertise wherever it can have the greatest impact.
• Lead technical strategy for complex initiatives that connect to high-level business objectives, translating product vision into technical approach with clear execution plans.
• Proactively identify and mitigate technical risks before they become critical issues, developing contingency plans and architectural safeguards for mission-critical systems.
• Serve as the technical authority in your area of expertise, making high-stakes technical decisions with significant long-term implications for the platform.
• Elevate the capabilities of senior engineers through targeted mentorship on both technical excellence and professional development, including architecture reviews, leadership development, cross-functional collaboration skills, and creating opportunities for others to grow their influence beyond pure technical contributions.
• Drive the resolution of deeply complex technical debt and legacy system modernization efforts that require deep domain knowledge and sophisticated migration strategies.
• Establish technical north stars and roadmaps for evolving critical systems over multiple quarters or years while balancing immediate business needs.
• Represent engineering in cross-functional strategic planning, providing technical perspective that helps shape product direction and company initiatives.

What You'll Bring:

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, including proven expertise designing large-scale distributed systems that handle significant complexity and scale.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go and exceptional command of distributed systems principles. Your broader background may include full-stack or AI/ML system design.
• Distinguished technical leadership track record with examples of architectural solutions that enabled step-function improvements in system capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces, deconstructing complex technical challenges into manageable components with clear implementation paths.
• Deep technical influence within engineering organizations, with evidence of having shaped technical direction beyond your immediate team.
• Exceptional systems thinking that considers interactions between components, anticipates failure modes, and designs robust solutions for mission-critical applications.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts with extraordinary clarity to audiences at all levels, from engineers to executives.
• Established record of growing senior engineers into stronger technical leaders through mentorship and creating growth opportunities.
• Exceptional judgment when making architectural tradeoffs that balance performance, reliability, development velocity, and business impact.
• Strong product and business acumen that enables you to connect technical decisions to user experience and business outcomes.

Bonus Skills (Nice to Have)

• Experience architecting sophisticated AI/ML systems integrated into production platforms with demonstrable business impact.
• Track record of designing advanced machine learning solutions for developer tooling that represent step-function improvements over traditional approaches.
• Expertise in leveraging LLMs and other AI technologies to solve complex engineering challenges in the CI/CD domain.
• Deep understanding of technical AI safety, explainability, and the implications of AI/ML for developer workflow optimization.
• Experience with defining platform-level AI strategies that balance innovation with reliability and security requirements.
• Leadership in building complex frontend or full-stack systems, particularly those central to developer workflows or product experience.
• Broad technical fluency that spans backend, infrastructure, frontend, and AI domains, enabling you to influence architecture across varied technical surfaces.