Staff Software Engineer, On-Prem

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...