Senior Back-End Software Engineer, Infra

About Us

Circle is building the world’s leading all-in-one platform for online communities. We make it possible for creators, coaches, educators, and businesses to bring together their audience with engaging discussions, live streams, events, chat, courses, and payments — all in one place, all under their own brand.

We’re proud to be a fully remote company of around 200 (and growing!) team members from 30+ countries around the world. We seek exceptional individuals around the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, create a meaningful impact in their own lives. We don't track hours, but we do manage for high expectations very closely. We collaborate across time zones, are highly async, and like to document a lot.

Twice a year, we bring the whole company together in beautiful places around the world for our company offsites. So far, we’ve hosted offsites in Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, Thailand, Colombia, Italy, Ireland, and more, with still more to come!

Check out our Careers page for more about working at Circle.

About the role

We're scaling quickly, and the foundation that supports our product needs to scale with it. We're hiring a Senior Back-End Software Engineer to join our Infra team and take ownership of our Rails stack — keeping it modern, efficient, and built to last. You'll help shape internal tooling, reduce third-party dependencies, and ensure our infrastructure is ready for the next stage of growth.

What you'll be doing

• Maintain and modernize our Rails stack, including dependency upgrades, performance optimization and security enhancement
• Build internal tools, SDKs, and libraries to improve developer experience and infrastructure scalability
• Partner with your front-end counter-parts and SREs to support observability, performance, and reliability initiatives
• Identify opportunities to build in-house systems that reduce reliance on costly third-party services
• Contribute to architectural decisions that improve the performance, security and cost-efficiency of our platform

What you'll need to be successful

• Strong alignment with our values (find our values on our career page if you haven’t read up on them yet)
• You are proficient in English (spoken, written, and reading) at a CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5
• Deep expertise with Ruby on Rails, with an emphasis on infrastructure and architectural improvements
• Solid experience working with MySQL and/or Postgres
• A strong track record of improving performance, scalability, and system reliability
• 5+ years of experience in a back-end engineering role, ideally focused on infrastructure or platform systems
• Comfortable working autonomously in a fast-paced, fully remote environment

Bonus points

• You’ve helped scale an early-stage product to 1M+ monthly active users.
• Experience with front-end technologies (especially React)
• You’ve built internal tooling or SDKs for use across engineering teams
• Experience reducing infrastructure or tooling costs through in-house solutions

$130,000 - $140,000 USD per year

The cash compensation range shown is a starting point. In addition to equity, benefits and perks, your cash compensation is subject to an annual review and increase on a once per year basis.

The fun stuff

• Fully remote: work from anywhere in the world!
• Autonomy and trust to do your job: we care about outcomes over everything else.
• Paid time away: all employees are given 35 days of PTO annually. We also offer a paid sabbatical after 5 years.
• Generous U.S. benchmarked compensation and startup equity no matter where you are in the world.*
• Awesome medical coverage with 100% coverage for you and your family, or medical reimbursement options where applicable!*
• Parental leave for parents expanding their family, or just starting one.
• Home office stipend to help you get up and running.
• Learning & development stipend to help you level up your professional skills.
• Annual bonus potential for roles that don't already receive variable income or commission.
• Company retreats: Twice a year, the Circle team gets together for a fully paid company retreat in incredible places around the world! We’ve had past retreats in Colombia, Portugal, and Mexico, with more planned on the horizon.
• Check out our Careers page for more.

*Your role, location and unique circumstance may affect this.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

As a fully-remote international company, diversity is baked into our DNA. Here’s how our CEO, Sid Yadav, frames our hiring mission: “let’s find talent in underserved and under-represented corners of the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, change their life.” To achieve this hiring mission, we offer competitive U.S. benchmarked compensation no matter where someone’s located in the world, and we proactively seek candidates who expand representation of backgrounds, cultures and lived experiences in our teams.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Circle is an equal opportunity employer and as such, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. If you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.