Senior Software Engineer, CircleCI
Query
$165-255k
Salary varies depending on location. Canada salary: $156,500—$215,000 CAD
Continuous integration and deployment services
Be an early applicant
Continuous integration and deployment services
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$165-255k
Salary varies depending on location. Canada salary: $156,500—$215,000 CAD
201-500 employees
Company mission
To manage change so software teams can innovate faster, empowering technology-driven organizations to do their best work – and making engineering teams more productive and innovative.
Role
Who you are
- AI-native engineering practices. You use AI tools daily and can speak to what you've built, where they changed your approach, and where they fall short
- Hands-on data experience. You've built or owned data-intensive systems such as ingestion pipelines, event-driven architectures, or analytical and time-series datastores. You understand the tradeoffs between transactional and analytical storage, and you've designed schemas and tuned queries for high-volume workloads. Experience with ClickHouse or another columnar database is a strong plus
- Backend depth in Go. You're strong in Go, or strong in a comparable language and eager to work in Go: interface design, data modeling, service integration, and concurrency. Familiarity with React and TypeScript is a plus, since you'll occasionally work on the product surfaces that display this data
- Distributed systems judgment. You understand delivery guarantees, idempotency, backpressure, and failure recovery. You know when to rely on a framework's reliability guarantees rather than building your own
- Technical leadership. You've led the design of complex systems and made tradeoffs deliberately. You leave foundations others can build on. You raise the quality bar through reviews, mentoring, and direct feedback, not just through the code you write
- A track record of shipping. 5+ years building and operating production backend systems. Your work has served real users, and you've treated latency, reliability, and correctness as design concerns
- You care about how data powers the product, not just where it lives. You know how to make a datastore fast at scale, and have tuned schemas and queries against real production load. You think like a platform engineer, measuring your work by how much it unblocks the teams building on it. AI isn't a tool you reach for occasionally; it's a core part of how you approach and solve problems. If that sounds like you, we want to talk
What the job involves
- Every pipeline, job, and test that runs on CircleCI generates data, and that history is one of our biggest advantages in an agentic software delivery lifecycle. Flaky test detection, test insights, pipeline search, and agents that reason about why a build failed all depend on fast, reliable access to it
- The Query team owns the system that makes this possible. We pull product data out of the transactional services that create it and store it in datastores built for historical and analytical workloads. We serve it through domain-level APIs to CircleCI's product teams and to customers through our public API. Our goal is to make storing data "fire and forget" for every other team, and querying it fast and dependable at a scale that keeps growing
- Build AI-natively. AI is how we work. It's not a productivity layer on top of engineering, but the default starting point for how problems get approached and solved
- Shape how we store data at scale. Own and harden our ClickHouse-based storage layer. Design schemas for known and emerging access patterns, and tune ingestion and query performance to support production-scale data
- Build the pipelines that move our data. Design and own ingestion from event streams and durable workflows built on Temporal. Data should arrive reliably, stay queryable while it's in transit, and never slow down the critical path of the services that produce it
- Serve data to the product and to customers. Evolve our platform into the default path for historical queries. Make getting historical data easy, not a bottleneck. Teams should be able to get what they need quickly and with minimal hand-holding, while Query keeps enough visibility into how the data is used to optimize ingestion and reads across every consumer. Build in the indexing, caching, and tiered storage required to keep it performant
- Set technical direction. When the problem is complex or the answer isn't obvious, you lead the design discussion, write up the architecture decision, and make the call. You help decide which data domain we migrate next and how
- Champion observability. Use Honeycomb, Datadog, and Rollbar to understand ingestion lag, query latency, and data correctness. For a data platform, operational data drives stability, not just incident response
- Keep things moving. You take ambiguous data problems from design to production quickly, and you help the people around you move faster too
- You don't just patch problems, you ask why they happened. You'll fix the immediate issue, then solve the underlying team practice, process, or system that let it through
Our take
Engineering has seen the rise of agile, containerisation and DevOps over the last few years. As a result, the idea of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) has grown to be an important part of the engineering space. CircleCI is one company that taps into this field, offering a lightweight and open service.
There are now a lot more companies that have a culture of continuous delivery. CircleCI specifically helps automate all the steps that occur between the time developers make changes to the code and when the application gets in front of the customer. The company has a strong tailwind from this macro trend and their product is loved by engineers, putting them in a strong place to build a strong business.
Services in the sector have grown constricted and cost-heavy, but in 2022, CircleCI debuted a free tier service for engineering teams in a move away from this. By offering flexibility across an increased number of major platforms, including Docker, Windows, and MacOS, the company works towards its ultimate aim to empower technology-driven organisations.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
May 2021
$100m
SERIES F
Apr 2020
$100m
SERIES E
Total funding: $315m
Company benefits
- Remote-first company
- Home office stipend
- Unlimited PTO
- Generous parental leave
- Health benefits that can cover employees and dependents up to 100%
- Quarterly wellness days, a free Calm subscription, wellness reimbursement, and Cleo for new parents
- Opportunities to learn new skills, including project-based learning and presentations from our colleagues
- Udemy for on-demand learning, and an annual stipend for personal development outside of CircleCI
Company HQ
The East Cut, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jim Rose
(CEO)Joined CircleCI as COO. Serial entrepreneur, founding Distiller (acquired by CircleCI) and Copious.
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