Lead Engineer, CMS Builder at Circle

About Circle

Circle is building the world’s leading all-in-one platform for online communities. We enable creators, coaches, educators, and businesses to bring audiences together with discussions, live streams, events, chat, courses, and payments under their own brand. We are a fully remote company of around 200 team members across 30+ countries, collaborating asynchronously and gathering twice a year for company offsites.

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead Engineer (Rails/React) to join the CMS Builder team. This team owns core user-facing areas including discussions, courses, Home feed, weekly digests, search, and a website builder used by millions. As Lead Engineer, you will bring deep backend expertise, manage a small team, collaborate with founders, product, and design, and own end-to-end delivery of high-impact projects.

What you will be doing

• Lead development of high-scale backend systems powering the website builder experience.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and leadership to define what to build and how to build it.
• Ship thoughtful, high-quality code that balances speed with care.
• Mentor, guide, and grow a globally distributed engineering team while leading by example.
• Own project execution from technical planning through delivery.
• Drive performance optimizations and architectural improvements where milliseconds matter.
• Design and analyze A/B tests to validate product changes and improvements.
• Engage with stakeholders to align priorities and technical direction.

What you will need to be successful

• Strong alignment with Circle values and excellent written and spoken English proficiency (CEFR C2 / ILR 5).
• 8+ years experience in full-stack or backend-heavy development, with deep knowledge of Ruby on Rails and supporting technologies such as Sidekiq, Kafka, and Postgres.
• Experience building performant applications at scale, mindful of load time, bottlenecks, and architectural trade-offs.
• 3+ years leading or mentoring engineers in high-growth, fast-paced environments.
• Clear communicator able to align technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strategic thinker who can also dive into execution and own outcomes end-to-end.
• Self-starter who thrives in a remote, async-first culture and takes initiative.

Bonus points

• Experience collaborating with founders, designers, or product leads to shape early product direction.
• Familiarity with frontend development in React.
• Experience building or scaling a page builder or CMS-style product.
• Examples of using AI tools to analyze data or boost productivity.
• Prior experience as a founder or in a highly entrepreneurial environment.

Compensation

Base salary range: $160,000 - $170,000 USD per year. The cash compensation shown is a starting point. In addition to equity, benefits, and perks, cash compensation is subject to annual review.

The fun stuff - Benefits and perks

• Fully remote - work from anywhere in the world.
• Paid time away - 35 days of PTO annually, plus a paid sabbatical after 5 years.
• Generous U.S. benchmarked compensation and startup equity, adjusted for location and circumstance.
• Awesome medical coverage with 100% coverage for you and your family, or medical reimbursement options where applicable.
• Parental leave for parents expanding their family.
• Home office stipend to help you get set up.
• Learning and development stipend to level up skills.
• Company retreats twice a year in locations around the world.
• Annual bonus potential for roles that do not already receive variable income or commission.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

As a fully-remote international company, diversity is central to our mission. Circle aims to find talent in underserved and under-represented corners of the world and offer U.S. benchmarked compensation regardless of location to expand representation across backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Circle is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. If you require accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

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