What You'll Be Responsible ForAs a Distinguished Engineer at Circle, you will drive the long-term technical direction of Circle's platform and core systems, shaping architectures that scale across products, teams, and regulatory environments. You will lead complex, cross-cutting engineering initiatives that span multiple organizations, influencing architectural decisions well beyond a single team. Acting as a trusted technical authority, you will set a high bar for system reliability, performance, security, and developer experience while mentoring senior engineers and contributing to Circle's engineering standards, culture, and technical strategy.
What You'll Work On- Design, evolve, and steward core platform architectures to ensure scalability, reliability, and long-term resilience.
- Drive architectural direction and technical strategy for critical distributed systems used across Circle's product ecosystem.
- Lead cross-team, cross-functional technical initiatives in partnership with Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, Security, and Compliance.
- Provide deep technical leadership and mentorship, elevating system design quality and engineering rigor across teams.
- Identify and address platform-wide technical debt, architectural risks, and systemic bottlenecks.
- Influence engineering-wide best practices in observability, reliability, performance, and developer experience.
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor across the company, contributing to major technical decisions and long-term platform evolution.
- Champion innovation, knowledge sharing, and engineering excellence as a senior technical thought leader at Circle.
What You'll Bring to CircleCore Requirements- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including deep expertise designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
- Proven track record of architecting and scaling platform systems that support multiple downstream products and teams.
- Ability to set long-term technical direction while making pragmatic, high-impact execution decisions.
- Extensive experience operating critical, highly available systems with strong observability, reliability, and performance practices.
- Exceptional system design skills, with the ability to debug and resolve complex issues across services and architectural boundaries.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with demonstrated influence on technical direction beyond immediate teams.
Preferred Requirements- Experience building internal developer platforms or shared services adopted broadly across an organization.
- Familiarity working in regulated, compliance-heavy, or security-sensitive environments.
- Track record of shaping engineering-wide practices, tools, or standards as a recognized technical leader.
Circle is on a mission to create an inclusive financial future, with transparency at our core. We consider a wide variety of elements when crafting our compensation ranges and total compensation packages.
Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to: relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs. Please note that compensation ranges may differ for candidates in other locations.
Base Pay Range: $285,000 - $352,500
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