Manager, Software Engineering

**Circle** Manager, Software Engineering; $182,500 - $240,000 base; US (remote)

**About Circle** 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.

**Responsibilities** - Run day-to-day activities of a dynamic engineering teams, including requirements grooming, scrums, retrospectives and team outings - Design, build, and maintain APIs, user-facing experiences, services, and systems. - Provide technical and architectural direction for the development, design, integration, testing, and maintenance of our platform - Lead agile software processes for engineering teams and introduce best-in-class industry practices - Partner with stakeholders to ensure the teams' contributions align with company objectives, develop technology roadmaps and set realistic product release schedules - Perform full lifecycle of team management to attract, engage, retain, coach and performance manage teams of exceptional engineers (e.g., mentoring, recruiting, training and development, performance evaluation) - Act as an internal ambassador for the engineering team to other groups, communicating the opportunities and constraints technology offers to the development of projects - Manage technical debt to ensure our development velocity stays responsive and predictable while minimizing production incidents of our operations - Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives as a member of Circle's engineering management team - Coordinate the execution of these activities working with cross-functional teams within Circle

**Required Skills** A. 3 or more years of experience with technical leadership B. 7 or more years of experience with software engineering C. 3 or more years experience coding in one of the following languages: Go, Java, and/or Javascript D. Hands on technical manager experienced in designing, building and deploying secure, scalable products and services

**Bonus Skills** - You love the idea of coaching and building leaders (both within your direct team and outside of your team) - You have a passion for enabling and motivating people to do their best work - You work very well cross-functionally, and are able to think rigorously and make hard decisions and tradeoffs - You have experience managing remote teams - The ability to thrive on a fast pace environment with high level of autonomy and responsibilities - Aiming more on the M1 side.  Still very technically hands on vs a manager of managers.

**Green flags** - Builder-manager: former Staff Engineer, TLM, or startup CTO who moved into management but still reviews architecture and goes deep technically. - AI-native leader with concrete usage — names tools, describes workflow changes, explains how they're upleveling the team, has a point of view on the future SDLC with AI. - Systems thinker with meaningful backend, infrastructure, platform, or transactional systems ownership — not just delivery or optimization. - Domain fit: AI-forward or web3/crypto leader. Payments and general fintech are neutral/learnable, not a strength. - Preferred pools: Coinbase, builder-heavy high-growth startups, Staff/TLM-to-EM transitions. - Still close to the metal — directly owns technical decisions rather than delegating to tech leads.

**Red flags** - Multiple short stints, recent gaps, or repeated short tenures at weak or failing companies. - Low-conviction company backgrounds: Block, Gemini, Ripple, PayPal, Paxos, Dapper Labs, OP Labs, Eigen/EigenLabs, Uphold, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, and traditional banking-heavy companies. - Professional / delivery / process-heavy managers — ceremonies, spreadsheets, little direct technical ownership ('my team handles the tech'). - Payments or banking infra-heavy profiles — Arc already has this skill set elsewhere in the org. - Backend optimization, migration, or platform tuning profiles with no product-building story. - Onboarding-heavy or mobile-heavy consumer app backgrounds. - FANG big-tech cogs with narrow slice ownership, or ads/monetization-focused leaders — Circle's work is transactional, not ads-driven. - Too high-level — director altitude, founder/CTO types who became hands-off, leaders who rely on a VP Eng layer to do the real work. - Less than ~1 year of management experience, unless unusually strong technical lead signal.

**Logistical Info** - **Location: **US (remote) - **Compensation:** $182,500 - $240,000 base + equity. - **Other:** Flat, collaborative organization with high feedback velocity; clear expectation of direct and open communication. Hiring for across their core teams, including CPM, liquidity, on-chain business logic, and developer tooling/platform groups. - **Number of openings:** 1