VP, Engineering - San Francisco - Circle

Description

Overview

Circle (NYSE: CRCL) is one of the world's leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure. Circle's platform includes the world's largest regulated stablecoin network anchored by USDC, Circle Payments Network for global money movement, and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet. Enterprises, financial institutions, and developers use Circle to power trusted, internet-scale financial innovation. Learn more at

What You'll Be Part Of

Circle is committed to visibility and stability in everything we do. As we grow as an organization, we\'re expanding into some of the world\'s strongest jurisdictions. Speed and efficiency are motivators for our success and our employees live by our company values: High Integrity, Future Forward, Multistakeholder, Mindful, and Driven by Excellence. We have built a flexible work environment where new ideas are encouraged and everyone is a stakeholder.

Engineering at Circle

Circle is a financial technology company at the epicenter of the emerging internet of money—where value can move globally, nearly instantly, and more efficiently than legacy settlement systems. This new infrastructure layer unlocks transformative opportunities across payments, commerce, and markets, helping increase global economic prosperity and financial inclusion.

Our platform—including USDC, a blockchain-based digital dollar—enables businesses, institutions, and developers to build on this evolution of money and technology.

What You'll Be Part Of

Circle is committed to transparency, stability, and trust in everything we do. As we scale across leading regulatory jurisdictions globally, speed, reliability, and execution excellence are core to our success. Our culture is grounded in four values—Multistakeholder, Mindfulness, Driven by Excellence, and High Integrity—which guide how we build, collaborate, and lead.

Circlers operate in a distributed, remote-first environment that values flexibility, inclusion, and shared ownership. New ideas are encouraged, and everyone is a stakeholder in Circle's success.

What You'll Be Responsible For

You will define and lead the long-term technical vision, strategy, and execution for Circle's platform engineering organization. This includes ensuring the platforms that enable Circle's products are scalable, secure, reliable, and compliant as the business grows globally. As a VP1, you will lead large, distributed engineering organizations through directors and senior managers, aligning multiple platform domains with company priorities. You will partner closely with executive leaders across Product, Security, Compliance, Infrastructure, and Business teams to translate strategic objectives into durable platform capabilities, while establishing operating models, engineering standards, and talent strategies that enable sustained delivery and engineering excellence.

What You'll Work On

• Own and drive the multi-year technical vision and roadmap for Circle's product-enabling platforms.
• Lead multiple engineering organizations through directors and senior managers, setting clear objectives, operating rhythms, and accountability.
• Provide executive-level technical leadership on architecture, system design, and critical decisions for complex, distributed platform systems.
• Partner with Product, Security, Compliance, and Infrastructure leaders to deliver platform capabilities aligned with business priorities and regulatory requirements.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for reliability, scalability, performance, security, and developer experience.
• Anticipate and manage platform risks, dependencies, and technical debt to ensure long-term resilience and sustainability.
• Act as a senior ambassador for engineering, clearly communicating platform opportunities, constraints, and trade-offs to executive and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Contribute to engineering-wide strategy, planning, and talent initiatives as a member of Circle's senior engineering leadership team.

Core Requirements

What You'll Bring to Circle

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 8+ years in senior engineering leadership roles.
• Proven experience leading platform or infrastructure engineering organizations in a product-centric environment.
• Demonstrated success managing leaders of leaders, including directors and senior managers.
• Strong technical background with experience building and operating large-scale, highly available distributed systems.
• Expertise running critical, high-traffic platforms, including observability, scaling, incident response, and reliability engineering practices.
• Ability to balance long-term platform strategy with near- and mid-term execution and delivery.
• Experience partnering closely with Product and cross-functional executives to translate business needs into shared platform solutions.
• Passion for developing leaders, building strong teams, and fostering a culture of accountability and excellence.
• Experience leading globally distributed, remote-first teams.
• Comfort operating in fast-paced environments with significant autonomy, scope, and responsibility.

Preferred Requirements

• Experience building internal developer platforms or shared services used broadly across an organization.
• Background working in regulated, security-sensitive, or compliance-heavy environments.
• Experience scaling platforms in high-growth or rapidly evolving companies.

Circle is on a mission to create an inclusive financial future, with transparency at our core. We consider a wide variety of elements when crafting our compensation ranges and total compensation packages.

Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to: relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs. Please note that compensation ranges may differ for candidates in other locations.

Base Pay Range: $317,500 - $365,000

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, or any other protected status required by the laws in the locations where we hire. Additionally, Circle participates in the E-Verify Program in certain locations, as required by law.

Should you require accommodations or assistance in our interview process because of a disability, please reach out to for support. We respect your privacy and will connect with you separately from our interview process to accommodate your needs.