The roleWe are looking for a hands-on engineering manager who has built identity or authorization systems at scale and can lead a team through significant platform change. You will set the technical direction for authentication, authorization, customer and emerging agent identity capabilities. You will manage and grow a team, partner closely with Security and product teams, and stay close to the work through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, incident response, and occasional implementation with a strong AI focus. This is both a people-management and technical role. You will be expected to make architecture decisions, explain trade-offs clearly, and create the conditions for the team to execute well. You will work closely with the team’s Staff Engineer and Team Lead, and help the broader organization understand how identity works at Circle.
What you will do- 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. Lead technical designs, review critical code paths, debug production issues with the team, participate in incident response, and build 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.
What we are looking for- Experienced manager. You have at least three years of experience managing software engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and developing senior individual contributors. You have led a team through a significant migration, re-platforming, or architectural change.
- Deep identity or authorization experience. You have substantial hands-on experience building identity, authentication, authorization, or access-control systems at scale. Your background may include OAuth 2.x and OIDC, SAML and enterprise SSO, session and token design, API credentials, service or workload identity, MFA and passkeys, or policy and entitlement engines.
- Strong architectural judgment. You have designed a system that other teams built on. You can explain the important trade-offs, how you managed migration and adoption, and what you would change if you were designing it again today.
- Still technical. You stay close to production systems, read code and designs critically, and can help debug a difficult authentication or authorization issue. Recently, you have designed, prototyped, reviewed, or shipped production code.
- Security-minded operator. You have dealt with real world Identity, Auth/Authz security problems and changed the design or operating model as a result. You understand that security monitoring requires more than tracking errors and latency.
- Clear communicator. You write design documents people can use, explain complex systems plainly, and give leadership a direct answer with a recommendation attached.
Especially valuable for this role- 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 clear point of view on agent registration and lifecycle, delegation chains, least privilege, token scoping, revocation, auditability, and how to preserve 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.
We do not expect this area to have a settled playbook. We do expect you to be comfortable designing secure systems in an emerging space and to understand the difference between an agent’s identity, the authority delegated to it, and the credentials it uses at runtime.
Nice to have- Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, or another regulated environment where KYC/KYB, entitlements, auditability, and operational controls are part of the product.
- Familiarity with relevant 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.
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: $195,000 - $236,667
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