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Salary: USD 180,000 - 285,000 / annual
CircleCI is reinventing CI/CD by building AI-native interfaces that help developers understand and trust automated build systems. The On-Prem team ships CircleCI Server, a self-hosted CI/CD platform for customers in regulated industries, air-gapped environments, and organizations with strict data residency and compliance requirements.
As a Staff Software Engineer on the On-Prem team, you will own the platform strategy and technical direction for the tooling, test infrastructure, and release automation that internal CircleCI teams use to develop and maintain services inside Server. You'll make shipping into Server easy for every team by standardizing observability on OpenTelemetry, building diagnostics that help operators find problems quickly, and simplifying the install and upgrade experience for customers running Server in environments you'll never see.
You'll be responsible for Server's foundation—from the Kubernetes infrastructure it deploys into to the operational tooling that internal teams and customers depend on. This extends beyond your own code to the systems and teams around it. You'll partner directly with Product, Engineering Management, Support, and Customer Engineering to translate business goals into technical strategy, understand the "why" behind the roadmap, and make informed tradeoffs.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building AI-natively: using AI as the default starting point for how you approach and solve problems
- Owning platform strategy for internal release tooling and test infrastructure
- Simplifying customer install, upgrade, and operational experiences with sensible defaults
- Standardizing observability and diagnostics to help operators and support teams resolve issues faster
- Mentoring engineers and raising the quality bar through technical leadership
- Making architecture decisions that span multiple systems and teams with business context
Requirements:
- 8+ years building production backend and infrastructure systems with a track record of taking accountability for outcomes
- Deep experience with Kubernetes and Helm in production, including designing, deploying, and debugging systems in customer-operated environments (air-gapped, restricted network, unfamiliar cluster shapes)
- Strong backend and systems foundation with expertise in Go, API design, data modeling, distributed systems, and operational tooling
- Platform mindset: experience building internal platforms, frameworks, and systems that make other engineers more productive
- AI-native engineering practices: daily use of AI tools with ability to articulate what you've built, how they changed your approach, and where they fall short
- Experience shipping on-premises or self-hosted software (enterprise on-prem, self-hosted SaaS, or distributed systems installed by customers)
- System design with business context: ability to make architecture decisions across multiple systems and teams, weigh tradeoffs against business needs, and document reasoning
- Technical leadership: mentoring engineers, giving direct feedback on technical direction, and raising quality bar through reviews and design discussions
