Distinguished Software Engineer

Circle (NYSE: CRCL) is one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure. Circle’s platform includes the world’s largest regulated stablecoin network anchored by USDC, Circle Payments Network for global money movement, and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet. Enterprises, financial institutions, and developers use Circle to power trusted, internet-scale financial innovation.

About the role

Circle is committed to transparency, stability, and trust in everything we do. As we grow globally across some of the world’s strongest regulatory jurisdictions, speed, reliability, and execution excellence are critical to our success. Our culture is grounded in four core values—Multistakeholder, Mindfulness, Driven by Excellence, and High Integrity—which guide how we build, collaborate, and lead. Circlers operate in a distributed, remote-first environment that values flexibility, diverse perspectives, and shared ownership. New ideas are encouraged, and everyone is a stakeholder in Circle’s success.

Responsibilities

• 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.

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 Qualifications

• 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.

Pay

Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to: relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs. Base pay range: $285,000 - $352,500.