Engineering Manager, Digital Assets

**Circle** Engineering Manager, Digital Assets; $182.5K–$240K base + bonus + equity; US or Canada (Remote)

**About Company** Circle is a global financial technology company at the forefront of the new internet of money. Our infrastructure — including USDC, a blockchain-based dollar — powers payments, commerce, and financial applications worldwide. We help businesses, institutions, and developers leverage breakthrough blockchain technologies to drive global economic prosperity and digital inclusion.

**About the Role** Circle is hiring an Engineering Manager for the Digital Assets pillar — risk, onboarding, and compliance engineering. The hire will guide a team building reliable, scalable risk and compliance technology (fraud decisioning, payment risk, transaction monitoring, risk operations tooling, customer onboarding controls, and privacy/compliance tech) while keeping product usability and the needs of internal and external users central to technical decisions. This is a hands-on M1 role, not a manager-of-managers.

**Responsibilities** - Guide the delivery of risk, onboarding, and compliance engineering systems with meaningful production scale and complexity. - Lead a team of engineers through hiring, coaching, feedback, prioritization, and performance accountability. - Guide architecture, system design, engineering tradeoffs, code quality, and incident learning; remain technically engaged enough to challenge designs and debug issues. - Partner effectively with Risk, Compliance, Product, Security, and adjacent engineering groups. - Balance effective controls with user friction, operational workflows, and product simplicity. - Own delivery of production services with measurable reliability, scalability, and customer impact. - Use modern AI-assisted development thoughtfully while independently validating code, tests, and system behavior.

**Required Skills** A. 3+ years of direct engineering people management with clear hiring/development/performance responsibilities (hard minimum). B. Experience leading teams building or operating large-scale production software systems with credible architecture, reliability, and delivery experience. C. Relevant exposure to risk, fraud prevention, payments, compliance, privacy, or closely related products (direct domain experience valued; adjacent backgrounds considered). D. Hands-on technical depth — specific architectural contributions and personal role in shipping systems. E. Strong product judgment — can balance controls with user friction, operational workflows, and product simplicity. F. Clear communication of who uses the systems (risk/compliance analysts, business operators, developers, customers) and how their workflows influence engineering decisions.

**Bonus Skills** - Ledger, settlement, transaction monitoring, or regulatory reporting ownership. - Experience shipping compliance automation (KYC/AML, sanctions/PEP, dispute workflows). - AI-forward engineering habits — personally building production AI infrastructure (agent orchestration, evaluation systems, workflow engines) is a differentiator. - Multi-tenant platform experience serving many internal customers.

**Logistical Info** - Location: Remote — United States or Canada (**not Montreal**). - Compensation: $182,500 – $240,000 base + bonus + equity. - Number of openings: 1. - **Other:** Full benefits and equity; work authorization in the US or Canada required; flat, collaborative organization with high feedback velocity and direct communication.

**Ideal Background** - Target lanes: Fraud / risk engineering (fraud decisioning, payment risk, transaction monitoring, risk ops tooling, onboarding controls). Payments / commerce (payment and order platforms, checkout, transaction experiences, risk/compliance integrations). Privacy / compliance technology (privacy infrastructure, compliance applications, governance systems, operational tooling used by analysts). Product-oriented platforms (high-scale backend systems or developer platforms with clearly demonstrated user workflows and end-to-end product ownership). - Comp note: $182.5K–$240K anchor from #1300; Matthew confirmed base + bonus + equity structure on Oct 14. Not pillar-confirmed; treat as working band. - Pillar HM: TBD (not named in brief). Matthew Durr is the Squad-facing recruiter for routing. - 24h feedback SLA commitment from Matthew for Q4; track and surface misses in the weekly update. - Canada opened as of Oct 14 (Matthew), except Montreal. - **Important**: a blockchain or crypto background is NOT, by itself, a substitute for demonstrated engineering leadership, relevant systems experience, and user-oriented product thinking. - Interview context: Circle AT A GLANCE for candidate prep — USDC issuer ($10T+ on-chain volume in 2025), NYSE:CRCL public since 2025, Arc L1 mainnet live Sept 16 2026 (validators include BlackRock/Visa/Mastercard/DTCC), Circle National Trust OCC approval July 2026, Agent Stack and CPN Managed Payments shipping.

**Green Flags** - Specific technical scale — architecture and operational complexity, critical services owned, reliability or throughput challenges, candidate's own role in decisions. - Product impact with concrete user problems addressed — workflow improvements, reduced friction, better decision quality, meaningful business outcomes. - Domain fluency — can explain risk/compliance tradeoffs and how engineering choices support both controls and user experience. - Management clarity — teams managed, reporting structure, hiring/coaching, execution ownership, major technical initiatives personally led. - Clean attribution — specific examples of what the candidate personally drove vs. what their org delivered.

**Red Flags** - **Traditional banking background** — Matthew (Oct 14): "Traditional banking won't get HMs excited". Treat as a strong deprioritizer, not an auto-exclusion if the candidate has material fintech/crypto/platform transition in recent roles. - Infrastructure or developer-tooling experience with little evidence of direct user or product understanding. - Broad leadership / strategy / cross-functional claims without concrete systems, decisions, or outcomes. - Risk, fraud, security, or compliance keywords without evidence of meaningful engineering contribution. - Product accomplishments described without explaining the target user, workflow, or tradeoffs. - Multiple short tenures, recent gaps, or weak-conviction employer backgrounds. - Payments/banking infra-heavy profile without transferable eng depth — Circle has this skill set elsewhere; needs an additive angle. - Montreal-based candidates (geo-ineligible for this pillar per Matthew's clarification).

**Interview Process** 1. Recruiter screen with Matthew Durr. 2. AI Implementation (1h 30m, technical panel) — build a working implementation from a short product brief using an AI coding assistant, across build, test, and extend phases. 3. AI Code Review (1h, technical panel) — review a pull request in a payments codebase with the Jira ticket, PR description, CI report, and diff on hand. 4. AI Troubleshooting (1h, technical panel) — investigate a simulated production incident using logs and metrics from a webhook delivery system, review code, propose a fix. 5. Architect Interview (1h, technical panel) — describe a system you designed in the past in detail; whiteboard allowed. 6. Flight Booking Design Interview (1h, technical panel) — design a flight booking system from scratch (flights, seat inventory, reservations, payments); start by nailing down requirements, then lead the design. 7. HR Performance Management (30m, non-technical panel) — conversation with Circle HR Business Partner on performance management, values, and culture alignment. 8. Hiring Manager Interview (45m, non-technical panel) — professional/technical growth, challenges, successes. 9. Pillar Interview (45m, non-technical panel) — wide-ranging conversation with pillar leaders on leadership style, cross-functional partnership, growing engineers, setting technical direction, driving delivery.