Staff Software Engineer, CircleCI
$180-285k
Salary for Canada: $195,000—$265,000 CAD / Salary for the UK: £125,000—£170,000 GBP
Continuous integration and deployment services
Be an early applicant
Continuous integration and deployment services
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$180-285k
Salary for Canada: $195,000—$265,000 CAD / Salary for the UK: £125,000—£170,000 GBP
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
- A track record of shipping at scale. You've built and owned systems that other engineers build on. 8+ years of production full-stack experience, with a history of taking accountability for outcomes
- Full-stack depth. Strong across the stack — React and TypeScript on the frontend, Go on the backend, owning API design, data modeling, and service integration
- System design, across domains. You own architecture decisions that span multiple systems and teams. You make the tradeoff calls, document the reasoning, and are the person others escalate to when the answer isn't obvious
- Business acumen. You understand how your domain connects to the broader business, and you use that context to guide technical decisions, not just implement them
- Technical leadership. You mentor engineers, give direct feedback on technical direction, and raise the quality bar across teams through how you engage in reviews and design discussions, not just what you ship
- Sound like you?
- You've stopped waiting for AI to mature and are already building with it, not as a productivity trick, but as a core part of how you think about problems. You care about the product as much as the code. You're drawn to work where the patterns don't exist yet and the best answer requires you to invent it. If that's how you already operate, we want to talk
What the job involves
- At CircleCI, our guiding principles aren't posters on a wall. We learn fast: we run experiments, accept failure, and scale what works
- We think like the customer: every decision connects back to the developer sitting in front of a failing build at 2 am
- We own the outcome: not just our slice of it, but the whole thing. If that's how you already work, you'll fit here
- We don't hire for a team
- We hire for CircleCI
- Where you land depends on where your strengths create the most leverage, and we figure that out together
- You might own the CI pipeline experience, deploy and release tooling, notification infrastructure, monetization flows, AI agent surfaces, or the foundational web platform
- The through line across all of it is the same: full-stack ownership, a high bar for craft, and work that directly shapes how tens of thousands of developers experience CircleCI every day
- 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
- Own technical strategy for your domain. You decide when and how the architecture evolves, balancing technical debt against velocity. When a project spans teams, you're the one who breaks down the ambiguity and takes ownership of whether it lands
- Invent new interfaces. Software delivery is being reinvented. Pipelines run autonomously, generate fixes, and surface results that need human judgment. The tools developers use to understand, trust, and act on that work don't exist yet. You'll define what they look like and establish the patterns the team builds on
- Own the full stack, at scale. Build features end-to-end in Go, React, and TypeScript. Your ownership extends past your own code to the systems and teams around it
- Connect engineering to the business. Partner directly with Product and Engineering Management to translate business goals into technical strategy. You understand the "why" behind the roadmap and use it to make tradeoffs
- Champion observability. Drive monitoring and alerting strategy across your domain, not just your own services. Use Honeycomb, Datadog, and Rollbar to reduce noise and improve the org's ability to diagnose problems quickly
- Mentor at scale. Mentor multiple engineers at once. Build the systems and documentation that transfer knowledge and remove single points of failure, not just your own
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.
Share this job
View 10 more jobs at CircleCI