Distinguished Software Engineer

As a Distinguished Engineer at Circle, you will drive the long-term technical direction of Circle’s platform and core systems, shaping architectures that scale across products, teams, and regulatory environments. You will lead complex, cross-cutting engineering initiatives that span multiple organizations, influencing architectural decisions well beyond a single team. Acting as a trusted technical authority, you will set a high bar for system reliability, performance, security, and developer experience while mentoring senior engineers and contributing to Circle’s engineering standards, culture, and technical strategy.

What You’ll Work On

1. Design, evolve, and steward core platform architectures to ensure scalability, reliability, and long-term resilience.
2. Drive architectural direction and technical strategy for critical distributed systems used across Circle’s product ecosystem.
3. Lead cross-team, cross-functional technical initiatives in partnership with Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, Security, and Compliance.
4. Provide deep technical leadership and mentorship, elevating system design quality and engineering rigor across teams.
5. Identify and address platform-wide technical debt, architectural risks, and systemic bottlenecks.
6. Influence engineering-wide best practices in observability, reliability, performance, and developer experience.
7. Serve as a trusted technical advisor across the company, contributing to major technical decisions and long-term platform evolution.
8. Champion innovation, knowledge sharing, and engineering excellence as a senior technical thought leader at Circle.

What You’ll Bring to Circle

Core Requirements

1. 15+ years of software engineering experience, including deep expertise designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
2. Proven track record of architecting and scaling platform systems that support multiple downstream products and teams.
3. Ability to set long-term technical direction while making pragmatic, high-impact execution decisions.
4. Extensive experience operating critical, highly available systems with strong observability, reliability, and performance practices.
5. Exceptional system design skills, with the ability to debug and resolve complex issues across services and architectural boundaries.
6. Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with demonstrated influence on technical direction beyond immediate teams.

Preferred Requirements

1. Experience building internal developer platforms or shared services adopted broadly across an organization.
2. Familiarity working in regulated, compliance-heavy, or security-sensitive environments.
3. Track record of shaping engineering-wide practices, tools, or standards as a recognized technical leader.

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: $285,000 - $352,500