Greenhouse ·
full-timeStaff Software Engineer, On-prem
Circleci · Remote, Canada or Remote, United States
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 the On-Prem Team The On-Prem team ships CircleCI Server, our self-hosted CI/CD platform for customers who need to run everything inside their own infrastructure: regulated industries, air-gapped environments, and teams with strict data residency and compliance requirements. Our mission is to deliver an on-premises CircleCI that is secure, highly available, and easy to install, upgrade, and support. Our team serves two kinds of customers: the organizations that run Server, and the CircleCI engineering teams whose services ship inside it. Beyond the product itself, we own the tooling and infrastructure that let those teams package, test, and release their services into Server and keep them current. As a Staff Engineer here, you'll care as much about the internal release experience as about making Server reliable and easy to operate for external customers. 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 we approach and solve problems. Make shipping into Server easy for every team. Own the platform strategy, setting the technical direction for the tooling, test infrastructure, and release automation that CircleCI teams use to develop and maintain their services inside Server. Give customers confidence installing, upgrading, and running CircleCI Server. Customers run Server in environments you'll never see. Make the install experience simpler and more predictable, upgrades safer, and day-to-day operation easier, starting with sensible defaults. Own Server's foundation. You'll be responsible for everything from the Kubernetes infrastructure Server deploys into, to the tooling internal teams and customers depend on. That responsibility extends past your own code to the systems and teams around it. Get operators from symptom to root cause fast. Standardize Server's observability on OpenTelemetry so it works with whatever platform each customer already runs. Build diagnostics that help operators, and the engineers supporting them, find the problem quickly. Partner with Support, Customer Engineering, and customers to find recurring issues and fix them at the source. Connect engineering to the business. Partner directly with Product and Engineering Management to translate business goals into technical strategy. You understand the "why" behind the roadmap and use it to make tradeoffs. What You'll Bring A platform mindset. You default to building tools, frameworks, and systems that make other engineers more productive rather than solving each problem one-off. You've built internal platforms before and can talk about the leverage they created for the teams that used them. AI-native engineering practices. You use AI tools daily and can speak to what you've built, where they changed your approach, and where they fall short. Deep experience with Kubernetes and Helm. You've designed, deployed, and debugged production systems on Kubernetes. You know where the sharp edges are, especially in customer-operated environments (air-gapped, restricted network, unfamiliar cluster shapes). Strong backend and systems foundation. 8+ years building production backend and infrastructure systems, with a history of taking accountability for outcomes. Strong in Go, with real experience in API design, data modelling, distributed systems, and operational tooling. System design with business context. You make architecture decisions that span multiple systems and teams, weigh tradeoffs against business needs, and document your reasoning. You're the person others escalate to when the answer isn't obvious. Technical leadership. You mentor engineers, give direct feedback on technical direction, and raise the quality bar across teams through how you engage in reviews and design discussions, not just what you ship. Experience with on-premises or self-hosted software. You've shipped software that runs in someone else's environment (enterprise on-prem, self-hosted SaaS, or a distributed system installed by customers), and you understand how that constraint shapes your design choices, release process, and support model. Sound Like You? You believe the best platform work makes everyone else faster. You're energized by the challenge of building software that has to work in environments you can't see or con
| Role | Staff Software Engineer, On-prem |
|---|---|
| Company | Circleci |
| Location | Remote, Canada or Remote, United States |
| Type | full-time |
| Compensation | Not disclosed |
| Posted | 2026-10-16 |
| Deadline | Rolling |
Typical process for this type of role
A general guide — the exact steps for this specific listing may vary; check the original posting for details.
- 1ApplicationSubmit your resume through the apply link.
- 2ScreeningRecruiter reviews your background against the role.
- 3AssessmentA technical test, assignment, or coding round, depending on the role.
- 4Interview(s)One or more rounds with the hiring team.
- 5OfferOffer letter with compensation and start date.
Before you apply
0/4About Circleci
CircleCI provides an automated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform designed to help teams test, validate, and deploy code. The service supports a wide range of applications, including mobile, web, AI, robotics, and autonomous vehicle software. By utilizing intelligent automation and agent-powered tooling, CircleCI enables organizations to maintain code quality and reliability while shipping software at scale. The platform is compatible with various environments and technologies, including AWS, Linux, Windows, macOS, and containerized applications. CircleCI is used by organizations such as Google, Okta, and Hugging Face to manage development pipelines with minimal human oversight.
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