Engineering Manager - Identity & Access Platform
$195k - $236.7k
Mid
San Francisco, CA, USA
RemoteRemote-first within the US.
Engineering ManagementEngineering Leadership
About the job
Requirements
- At least three years of experience managing software engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and developing senior individual contributors.
- Experience leading a team through a significant migration, re-platforming, or architectural change.
- Substantial hands-on experience building identity, authentication, authorization, or access-control systems at scale.
- Experience designing systems that other teams build on, explaining key trade-offs, and managing migration and adoption.
- Recent experience designing, prototyping, reviewing, or shipping production code, and the ability to critically review code and designs and help debug authentication or authorization issues.
- Experience addressing real-world identity and authorization security problems and changing system design or operating models as a result; understanding that security monitoring requires more than tracking errors and latency.
- Ability to write usable design documents, explain complex systems plainly, and give leadership recommendations.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for Circle’s identity and access platform.
- Manage, coach, and grow a team of backend and frontend engineers; set clear expectations, give direct feedback, develop senior engineers into technical leaders, and hire well.
- Stay close to the code and systems by leading technical designs, reviewing critical code paths, debugging production issues with the team, participating in incident response, and building prototypes when that is the fastest way to make progress.
- Partner with Security, Product, Onboarding, Risk, and product engineering teams that integrate with identity.
- Turn competing requests into a sequenced roadmap and explain the trade-offs behind it.
- Run the team’s delivery process, including planning, scoping, migrations, cutovers, rollback plans, and honest status reporting.
- Improve the team’s engineering practices, operational readiness, and ability to provide reliable platform capabilities to the rest of Circle.
Desired Qualifications
- Direct experience with Okta, Auth0, or an equivalent customer identity platform, including hosted-versus-custom architecture decisions, organization-level policies, or extensibility mechanisms.
- Experience with AI agent identity, delegated authorization, workload identity, service identity, or other non-human identity systems.
- A point of view on agent registration and lifecycle, delegation chains, least privilege, token scoping, revocation, auditability, and preserving accountability when an agent acts on behalf of a person or organization.
- Experience building or operating systems where software agents or automated services can take consequential actions under bounded authority.
- Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, or another regulated environment where KYC/KYB, entitlements, auditability, and operational controls are part of the product.
- Familiarity with identity and authorization patterns including on-behalf-of token exchange, MCP authorization, SPIFFE/SPIRE, workload identity federation, agent registries, or policy engines such as OPA or Cedar.
- Experience with Java or Kotlin backend systems and modern TypeScript frontend applications.
- Experience leading a geographically distributed team.
About the company
Circle is a global fintech company that helps businesses use digital currencies and public blockchains for payments, commerce, and financial applications. It provides a platform for digital payments and related financial services built on blockchain technology, charging transaction fees and service charges for its activities. How it works: Circle offers digital currency and blockchain-based payment capabilities that enable fast, secure transfers and cross-border transactions for businesses of all sizes; revenue comes from fees on these services. How it differs from competitors: Circle targets a broad range of business customers and focuses on integrating digital currencies and public blockchains into everyday commercial and financial processes, emphasizing security and efficiency. Circle's goal is to become a leading provider of enterprise-grade digital finance tools, helping many organizations adopt and use digital currencies and blockchain-based payments globally.
Company Size
1,001-5,000
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2013
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Binance invested $100 million on September 22, 2026, expanding USDC distribution globally.
- Circle launched Arc mainnet September 16, 2026, with over 100 builders day-one.
- Circle signed Tazapay September 8, 2026, adding 100-plus payout markets.
What critics are saying
- Jeremy Fox-Geen exits by December 31, 2026, and Sean Neville already left.
- Drift investors sued Circle in April 2026 over delayed asset freezing and CCTP transfers.
- A stablecoin security ruling freezes USDC distribution and wrecks Circle's business.
What makes Circle unique
- Circle holds an OCC national trust bank charter, rare among stablecoin issuers.
- USDC sits inside Binance, Coinbase, and Volante distribution channels.
- Arc launched September 16, 2026, tying USDC directly to payments infrastructure.
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Benefits
- Paid time off - We offer flexible paid time off — take what you need as long as it works with you and your team, and all Circle employees get mobile phone and home office reimbursements.
- Health coverage - No matter where you live, we offer a market competitive suite of benefits. Enroll in health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurances, and Circle covers some or all of the premiums.
- Invested in your future - All U.S. full-time and part-time employees enjoy 401(k) and pensions (with 4% company match if you contribute 5% or more), and share Circle’s success via company equity awards.
- Learning & development - Your individual growth and development is important to us and we provide the resources to help you grow your career while at Circle.