Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

About the role

Circle 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. As a member of the Data Platform Engineering team, you will own the core Data warehouse platform, data ingestion and processing, ETL/ELT pipelines orchestration platform, data cataloging, and data governance. These components power our Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Data Science teams by enabling experimentation, operational excellence, and actionable insights to accelerate business growth.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate data platform services (warehousing, orchestration, and catalogs).
• Continuously enhance platform operations by improving monitoring, performance, reliability, and resource optimization.
• Design, build, and maintain batch and streaming data ingestion frameworks to source data for analytical and operational needs, including on-chain data, internal system data, and partner data.
• Be a domain expert in streaming processing, data pipelines, data warehousing, and quality.
• Work closely with multiple stakeholders—including Product, Engineering, Data Science, Security, and Compliance teams—on data contract modeling, data lifecycle management, governance, and regulatory/legal compliance.
• Provide ML data platform capabilities for AI/Data Science teams to perform data preparation, model preparation and serving, and performance monitoring.
• Develop and maintain core services and libraries to enhance critical platform functionalities, such as cataloging data assets and lineage, tracking data versioning and quality, managing auto-backfilling, and implementing access controls on data assets.

Requirements

Senior Software Engineer (III)

• 4+ years of software engineering experience building data-intensive systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating scalable batch, micro-batch, or streaming data pipelines.
• Experience in business domains such as payment systems, credit cards, bank transfers, or blockchains.
• Familiarity with data governance, lineage, and provenance concepts.
• Strong understanding of open-source data technologies and cloud-native data platforms.
• Ability to tackle complex and ambiguous problems.
• Self-starter who takes ownership and enjoys moving at a fast pace.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across multiple remote teams, share ideas, and present concepts effectively.

Staff Software Engineer (IV)

• Includes all the requirements of a Senior Software Engineer, and:
• 7+ years in software engineering experience for large-scale and complex data systems.
• Proven technical leadership in architecture and system design, influencing designs across multiple teams.
• Deep expertise in one or more of: streaming systems, data warehousing, data modeling, or large-scale ingestion platforms.
• Ability to identify high-impact technical opportunities independently and drive them from concept to production.
• Strong experience in:
  • Data platforms integrated with downstream consumers, tools, and services.
  • Data quality, validation, and observability mechanisms across pipelines.
• Comfortable making and defending long-term architectural tradeoffs in ambiguous environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with streaming frameworks such as Apache Flink or Google Cloud Dataflow.
• Experience with NoSQL databases such as Bigtable or Cassandra.
• Hands-on experience taking an operational, data-intensive application from initial design to production (0→1), or scaling and operating it at production scale.
• Experience developing real-time analytics or near-real-time decisioning systems.

Pay

Base pay range: $195,000 - $257,500. Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs.