Distinguished Software Engineer

Circle is one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets and payment applications. As a Distinguished Engineer at Circle, you will drive the long-term technical direction of Circle’s platform, lead complex engineering initiatives, and mentor senior engineers while ensuring system reliability and performance.

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
• 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