Staff Software Engineer

CircleCI

Data is at the core of everything we do at CircleCI, and our data platform is what powers, controls, and stores it all. We’re seeking a Staff Engineer to join us and help lead the technical direction of our data platform!
We’re in search of an experienced engineer who is comfortable maintaining, navigating, and growing modern, cloud-based data platforms. You will make decisions and implement features that impact the entirety of our data platform and thus, the whole of our organization. Good communication, leadership skills, and high emotional intelligence are a must, because you'll be working with people across CircleCI to ensure they're getting what they need.
This is a full-time, remote role for candidates in the United States or Canada.

About You
You’re a seasoned engineer in the data infrastructure or data platform fields. You know the challenges of balancing reactive work, proactive development, security, and stability, while still maintaining a productive team. You’ve contributed to technical leadership and have driven decisions in a team setting; clearly communicating them with the relevant people, helping to implement them successfully, and then examining the journey for opportunities to improve. You're ready to mentor and lead, but also eager to learn!

About Our Team
Data Platform at CircleCI is responsible for providing simple, reliable, fast, and secure access to the data that powers our business. Data scientists and analysts in particular rely on us for timely access to accurate data to help their teams make the best possible decisions. We manage the data stores, pipelines, and processes that contain and govern data at CircleCI, and we make ourselves as accessible as possible to ensure that anyone in the company who needs data to do their jobs can get it.

What you’ll do:
  • Help us set our long-term technical vision.
  • Take the lead and make sizable contributions on enacting that vision.
  • Proactively identify and resolve future technical risk.
  • Help define and refine the workflows that make our team effective.
  • Use your experience to mentor, empower, and unblock engineers on your team.
  • Meet with partners from across the company to help facilitate their data needs, and listen to them on how to make our platform better.
  • Work with other teams like legal and security to make sure our platform is secure and in accordance with relevant legislation (such as GDPR or CCPA).
  • Participate in our on-call engineering rotation.
Who we’re looking for:
An engineer who’s comfortable with both the technologies we use, and running a service-minded platform team. We work to meet the needs of our users throughout the business, so a multi-functional, collaborative, and service-minded attitude is key. We highly value good communication, empathy, and initiative in all of our engineers and employees. Some qualities specific to this opening include:
  • A firm understanding of the fundamentals of data engineering and engineering at scale, including concepts like infrastructure-as-code, ETL, *nix systems, and Git.
  • Years of experience on a data platform, platform, operations, infrastructure, SRE, or a similarly-shaped team.
  • Someone who understands the importance of shipping early and often, and is comfortable making scoping decisions while managing technical debt.
  • An enthusiastic and effective communicator: interactions with our users across the business should be common and engaging to you, and you should be able to appeal to technical and non-technical listeners alike.
  • Previous technical leadership experience. This can be as a tech lead, a team lead, a lead on a particularly large and impactful project, or something similar.
  • On-call rotation experience.
We’re Particularly Interested In People Who:
  • Proficiency with Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and MongoDB.
  • Experience working remotely and with a fully distributed team/company.
  • Folks who model good work/life balance to the team and company.
 
CircleCI Engineering Competency Matrix
This role will be for level E4 on our Engineering Competency Matrix, our internal career growth system for engineers. These are the minimum expectations for this position, but we are always willing to discuss bringing people on at more senior positions when appropriate. Read our blog post about the competency matrix to learn more.