Engineering Manager, Platform

**Circle** Engineering Manager, Platform; $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 a frontline Engineering Manager for the broader Platform pillar — a hands-on technical leader who has genuinely managed engineers, remains close to architecture and implementation, and can help build resilient, secure, high-scale platforms. Reports to Mike Tsui (search owner). Not seeking traditional people managers who delegate all technical work or leaders whose value is primarily coordination. Identity / authentication / privileged access management is managed through a separate pillar req.

**Responsibilities** - Build and develop 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. - Own delivery of production services and platforms with measurable reliability, scalability, security, developer-productivity, or customer impact. - Use modern AI-assisted development thoughtfully while independently validating code, tests, system behavior, and correctness. - Create clarity from ambiguity; make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions; partner effectively with product, security, and adjacent engineering groups.

**Required Skills** A. 3+ years of direct engineering people management with clear hiring/development/performance responsibilities (hard minimum). B. Strongest signal is leading ~6+ engineers directly; confirm direct-report count, employment type, duration, and ownership of performance reviews. C. Hands-on M1 / tech-lead manager; more senior titles need evidence the candidate genuinely wants a frontline remit. D. Specific examples of architectures, core components, technical decisions, and the candidate's personal role in shipping a system. E. Modern backend services / distributed systems / platform-infrastructure engineering / production security engineering or comparable technically complex product infrastructure. F. Experience with consistency, fault tolerance, high availability, concurrency, async workflows, observability, performance, data integrity, resiliency, and operational excellence. G. Disciplined AI-forward engineering: plans with AI, reviews generated code, tests edge cases, independently verifies output rather than trusting a tool blindly.

**Bonus Skills** - Personally built production AI infrastructure — agent orchestration, evaluation systems, workflow engines, model routing, observability, developer tooling, safe deployment infrastructure. - Security engineering / security infrastructure ownership (cryptographic services, secure execution, platform controls, infrastructure security). - Data-intensive platform engineering (distributed data services, streaming, transactional or ledger-adjacent infrastructure). - Blockchain / digital-asset engineering (valuable but not mandatory).

**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 organization with high feedback velocity; search owner / hiring manager is Mike Tsui.

**Ideal Background** - Sourcing lanes: Core distributed systems / backend (high-volume APIs, event-driven systems, durable workflows, resilient microservices, storage/service architectures). Platform / infrastructure (developer platforms, internal frameworks, deployment systems, compute services, reliability + infra automation). AI infrastructure / developer tooling (agent frameworks, model/eval platforms, orchestration, test harnesses, AI-powered dev infra). Security engineering / security infrastructure (security-by-design systems, cryptographic services, secure execution, platform controls). Data-intensive platform engineering (distributed data services, streaming, transactional / ledger-adjacent infrastructure). - Target pools (not an approved-logo list): Meta, Google, Uber, Robinhood, Netflix, Shopify, Stripe + other high-performing platform / infra orgs. Prioritize the relevant team and contributions over logo. - Also strong — career paths combining engineering rigor at scale with hands-on execution in a smaller or faster-moving org. - Possible search titles: Engineering Manager, Software Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering Manager, Backend Engineering Manager, Infrastructure Engineering Manager, Security Engineering Manager, Tech Lead Manager. - Do NOT infer management experience from "Lead", "Head of Engineering", or "Founder" alone. - Comp note: $182.5K–$240K anchor; Matthew confirmed base + bonus + equity structure on Oct 14. Not pillar-confirmed. - 24h feedback SLA commitment from Matthew for Q4. - Canada opened as of Oct 14 (Matthew), except Montreal. - 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** - Can detail direct reports, feedback cycles, hiring decisions, and a difficult people-management situation they personally handled. - Describes a product or platform built from ambiguity through rollout, operations, and iteration — not just migrations or dashboards. - Explains alternatives, failure scenarios, test strategy, and their own code/design contribution. - Shows how AI assisted delivery and how output was challenged, tested, and independently verified. - Big-tech engineering rigor combined with hands-on smaller-team execution.

**Red Flags** - **Traditional banking background** — Matthew (Oct 14): "Traditional banking won't get HMs excited". Treat as a strong deprioritizer. - Tech lead title without direct people leadership. - AI tool usage with no evidence of engineering judgment ("Uses Copilot/Claude daily" with no concrete example). - Strategy-heavy management without implementation ownership — "Oversaw engineering strategy and drove cross-functional alignment". - Professional or multi-layer managers who no longer participate materially in design, code quality, or engineering delivery. - IT operations, endpoint administration, general corporate IAM, implementation consulting, program management, or integration-only backgrounds presented as core platform engineering. - Payments operations, banking workflows, customer onboarding, mobile/frontend-only, ads/growth without strong transferable backend/platform depth. - Generic blockchain/Web3 exposure without meaningful product usage, technical ownership, operational scale, or engineering fundamentals. - Repeated brief stays without context; unexplained manager-to-IC shifts; seniority/compensation expectations inconsistent with a frontline M1 role. - Vague buzzword-heavy summaries lacking attributable engineering achievements, metrics, systems, or clear ownership. - 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, with Mike Tsui and Platform leaders) — wide-ranging conversation with pillar leaders on leadership style, cross-functional partnership, growing engineers, setting technical direction, driving delivery.