Staff Software Engineer, Delivery Engineering

About CircleCI Engineering

CI/CD has been solved. Now it's being reinvented. AI agents don't just run pipelines. They write code, trigger builds, interpret failures, and propose fixes. The interfaces that developers use to understand and trust that work don't exist yet. We're building them.

At CircleCI, our guiding principles aren't posters on a wall. We learn fast: we run experiments, accept failure, and scale what works. We think like the customer: every decision connects back to the developer sitting in front of a failing build at 2 am. We own the outcome: not just our slice of it, but the whole thing. If that's how you already work, you'll fit here.

About Delivery Engineering

Delivery Engineering enables CircleCI engineers to deliver quickly, confidently, and securely. We provide the tools and resources that make standard patterns and best practices simple to adopt, and we reduce toil.

Our current focus is the agentic software development lifecycle: how changes are found, planned, built, reviewed, merged, and measured as AI agents take on more of the work. We evaluate the harnesses, repository patterns, skills, and agentic tooling available, decide what our teams should standardize on, and build and support the shared tooling other teams depend on.

We're a small, very senior team, and everyone on it shapes where we go. Every improvement we make compounds across the organization.

What You'll Do

• Build AI-natively. AI is how we work. It's not a productivity layer on top of engineering, but the default starting point for how problems get approached and solved.
• Shape how CircleCI builds software with agents. Help define the end-to-end agentic SDLC, from identifying a change through planning, execution, pull request, merge, and measuring impact afterward. Evaluate shared tooling and patterns, and help decide what teams standardize on.
• Start from how our teams actually work. Spend time with engineering teams to understand their workflows and where they get stuck. Use what you learn to drive decisions and direction that teams adopt because the work fits how they operate.
• Build platforms, not one-offs. Build and support shared tooling that other teams depend on, and own its adoption as much as its delivery. A tool nobody uses isn't done.
• Measure what matters. Instrument agent usage and outcomes so we know what improves throughput and quality and what just burns tokens. Treat cost, model choice, and reliability as design concerns.
• Make build-vs-buy calls. Evaluate models, vendors, and open-source tools against our needs, and choose the path that gets engineers the most leverage.
• Lead through influence. Write the design docs, lead technical discussions across teams, and mentor engineers across the org as they adopt agentic workflows.

What You'll Bring

• Direct experience driving agentic developer experience efforts. You've driven an initiative that changed how an engineering organization builds software with AI agents. You can speak to what you built, how you measured its impact, how you drove adoption, and what didn't work.
• Hands-on depth with agentic tooling. You work daily with coding agents, agent harnesses, MCP, and skills or prompt design. You know how to evaluate agent output and reason about model and token economics.
• A platform mindset. You've built and supported internal platforms or developer tooling that other engineers build on and rely on, and driven their adoption.
• Backend depth in Go. You've owned production backend services in Go, including API design, data modeling, and service integration.
• A track record at staff scope. 8+ years of production engineering experience, including technical decisions that spanned multiple teams and accountability for whether they landed.
• Decision-making grounded in your users. You build direction by listening first. You turn the needs of many teams into clear tradeoffs, document your reasoning, and bring people along.

This role is open to candidates based in Europe or in the Eastern time zone.

Sound like you?

You've stopped waiting for AI to mature and are already building with it, not as a productivity trick, but as a core part of how you think about problems. You care about the engineers using your tools as much as the code behind them. You're drawn to work where the patterns don't exist yet and the best answer requires you to invent it with the people who'll use it. If that's how you already operate, we want to talk.

Canada Base Pay Range

$195,000—$265,000 CAD

United Kingdom Base Pay Range

£125,000—£170,000 GBP

Expected salary range for specific metro areas including Boston, Washington DC, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, and Seattle. These metro areas may change periodically.

US Metro Zone 2

$200,000—$275,000 USD

Expected pay range for all other US locations not falling into Metro Zone 3 or Metro Zone 2.

US General

$180,000—$250,000 USD

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

About CircleCI

CircleCI is the world’s largest continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the hub where code moves from idea to delivery. As one of the most-used DevOps tools - processing more than 3 million jobs a day - CircleCI has unique access to data on how the most effective engineering teams work, and the tools to help software companies successfully leverage the power of AI into their commercial applications. Companies like Hinge, HuggingFace, and Samsung use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco with a global, remote workforce, CircleCI is venture-backed by Base10, Greenspring Associates, Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold
Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital, Next Equity Partners, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal Capital.

CircleCI is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

How CircleCI Uses AI in Hiring

At CircleCI, people make our hiring decisions. We use technology to support our recruiting team so they can spend more time on what matters most: getting to know you.

Where we may use AI

• Job descriptions and messaging: AI may help draft job descriptions and role-specific messaging so they are clear and accurate.
• Application review: For some roles, we use an AI tool to review applications, including resumes and application responses, against criteria our hiring team sets for the role. The tool generates a fit score and summary to help recruiters organize and prioritize applications.
• Interview notes: With advance notice, an AI note-taking tool may join interviews to record, transcribe, and summarize the conversation. This lets interviewers focus on talking with you. You will be told before each interview, and you may opt out at any stage by letting your recruiter know. If you opt out, the tool will not join, and your candidacy is not affected.
• Outreach: AI may help draft candidate outreach and scheduling messages, which our team reviews before sending.

Our commitment

AI does not make hiring decisions at CircleCI. Our recruiters and hiring teams review candidates and make every decision to advance or reject an application. No candidate is rejected based solely on an AI score. We have tools and processes in place to test for bias and to review how these tools perform, and we adjust our approach as AI technology and the laws that govern it change.

Your choices

You can ask for human-only review of your application, opt out of AI interview note-taking, request an accommodation, or ask questions about how we use AI. Contact [email protected]. For how we handle your data, including retention, see our Privacy Policy.