Principle Software Engineer - Indiana - Circles

Description

Overview

Founded in 2014, Circles is a global technology company reimagining the telco industry with its innovative SaaS platform, empowering telco operators worldwide to launch digital brands or refresh existing ones, accelerating their transformation into techcos. Circles partners with operators across multiple countries, including KDDI Corporation, Etisalat Group (e&), AT&T, and Telkomsel.

Circles operates three distinct businesses: Circles.Life, Circles Aspire, and Jetpac.

• Circles.Life: A wholly-owned digital lifestyle telco brand based in Singapore, powered by Circles' SaaS platform, leading in Singapore with awards for marketing, customer service, and innovative product offerings beyond connectivity.
• Circles Aspire: A global CPaaS provider delivering a cloud-based Experience Cloud platform for enterprises, service providers, and developers to scale mobile, messaging, IoT, and connectivity services.
• Jetpac: Travel tech solutions provider offering seamless eSIM roaming for 200+ destinations and innovative travel products for digital travelers; Jetpac was awarded Travel eSIM of the Year.

Circles is backed by global investors including Peak XV Partners, Warburg Pincus, Founders Fund, and EDBI.

Role

Principal Software Engineer, Backend (Manager Track)

Focus: Technical Visionary, People Leader, and Domain Accountability

Reports To: Engineering Director

Location: Bangalore (Hybrid)

Overview & Scope

This hybrid leadership role combines technical authority with people management responsibilities. You are the definitive technical and team leader for a critical Circles X domain, delivering the technical roadmap and scaling systems and engineering talent.

Key Responsibilities

1. Principal Technical Strategy & Architecture (The Visionary)
   • Domain Technical Vision: Define and drive the medium-to-long-term roadmap and architectural evolution for your core domain, aligned with the Director's strategy and business goals.
   • Architectural Accountability: Serve as the highest technical authority for your domain; accountable for design, integrity, resilience, security, and cost-efficiency of systems at global scale.
   • Technical Problem Solving: Tackle complex production issues or roadblocks and provide final solutions or direction to unlock other teams.
   • Hands-On Code Fluency: Maintain expert-level proficiency in Java/Spring Boot and distributed patterns to guide decisions and mentor Staff and Senior engineers.
2. People & Team Leadership
   • Directly manage, mentor, and coach a team of Software Engineers (Junior to Staff); include 1:1s, performance management, and career development.
   • Hiring & Talent Quality: Own hiring pipeline and define/maintain technical bar; participate in high-level interviews.
   • Team Health & Culture: Foster technical excellence, continuous learning, and accountability; manage performance to maintain a healthy, high-performing environment.
   • Delivery & Execution: Accountable for the team's delivery; partner with Product Management to translate strategy into milestones and ensure on-time execution.
3. Cross-Functional Influence & Operations
   • Operational Ownership: Ensure services are monitored, SLOs met, incident response conducted, and perform rigorous RCAs.
   • Stakeholder Alignment: Influence decisions up to Director level and with peers; articulate trade-offs, risks, and value to non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

Requirements
To demonstrate mastery in the following areas:

• Strategic proficiency in high-performance languages (e.g., Java, Go, Kotlin) for critical, low-latency services or cross-domain initiatives.
• Global scale resilience: Design and operate systems with 99.999% availability across multi-region/multi-cloud deployments; understanding of data consistency models and geo-distributed databases.
• Advanced Cloud Engineering (AWS/GCP): Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and modern container orchestration (Kubernetes); ability to design and govern CI/CD pipelines.
• Data Strategy & Data Flow Governance: Mastery of databases and real-time streaming (Kafka, Flink) for high-throughput, low-latency processing and analysis.
• Proactive Security & Observability: Security best practices at the architectural level; define observability standards (logging, tracing via OpenTelemetry/Jaeger, custom metrics).
• Performance Engineering: Experience identifying and eliminating bottlenecks; proficiency with profiling and benchmarking tools.

Tech Stack, But Not Limited To

Core Languages & Frameworks

• Java/Spring Boot: Expert-level proficiency for hands-on coding as needed.
• Highly Performant Languages: Java, Go, Kotlin.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• AWS/GCP proficiency; Kubernetes expertise.

Data & Streaming

• Real-time Data Streaming: Kafka; Database technologies including indexing and replication; NoSQL/SQL.

Other Expertise

• Observability: Standards for logging, tracing, and metrics.
• Security: Architectural security practices (OWASP Top 10).
• Performance Engineering: Profiling and benchmarking tools (e.g., JProfiler).

Circles is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, disability or age.

Data Protection and Privacy Statement
By submitting an application for this position, you consent to Circles' Candidate Data Protection and Privacy Policy. You also agree to the collection, use, and disclosure of your personal data for recruitment purposes. You acknowledge your rights and consent terms, including international data transfers where applicable. You may withdraw consent at any time; this may affect our ability to consider your application. When a third party submits your application, you authorize them to disclose relevant data on your behalf per the Policy.

Recruitment agencies: Circles acknowledges resumes only from preferred supplier partnerships. Do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Circles employees, or any other location. Circles is not responsible for fees related to unsolicited resumes not uploaded via our ATS.