Staff Software Engineer, On-Prem

The posting, as CircleCI wrote it

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 busine

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dividual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

How CircleCI Uses AI in Hiring

At CircleCI, people make our hiring decisions. We use technology to support our recruiting team so they can spend more time on what matters most: getting to know you.

Where we may use AI

• Job descriptions and messaging : AI may help draft job descriptions and role-specific messaging so they are clear and accurate.
• Application review : For some roles, we use an AI tool to review applications, including resumes and application responses, against criteria our hiring team sets for the role. The tool generates a fit score and summary to help recruiters organize and prioritize applications.
• Interview notes : With advance notice, an AI note-taking tool may join interviews to record, transcribe, and summarize the conversation. This lets interviewers focus on talking with you. You will be told before each interview, and you may opt out at any stage by letting your recruiter know. If you opt out, the tool will not join, and your candidacy is not affected.
• Outreach : AI may help draft candidate outreach and scheduling messages, which our team reviews before sending.

Our commitment

AI does not make hiring decisions at CircleCI. Our recruiters and hiring teams review candidates and make every decision to advance or reject an application. No candidate is rejected based solely on an AI score. We have tools and processes in place to test for bias and to review how these tools perform, and we adjust our approach as AI technology and the laws that govern it change.

Your choices

You can ask for human-only review of your application, opt out of AI interview note-taking, request an accommodation, or ask questions about how we use AI. Contact recruiting@circleci.com . For how we handle your data, including retention, see our Privacy Policy.