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 for outcomes. Strong in Go, with real experience in API design, data modelling, distributed systems, and operational tooling. • System design with business context. You make architecture decisions that span multiple systems and teams, weigh tradeoffs against business needs, and document your reasoning. You're the person others escalate to when the answer isn't obvious. • Technical leadership. You mentor engineers, give direct feedback on technical direction, and raise the quality bar across teams through how you engage in reviews and design discussions, not just what you ship. • Experience with on-premises or self-hosted software. You've shipped software that runs in someone else's environment (enterprise on-prem, self-hosted SaaS, or a distributed system installed by customers), and you understand how that constraint shapes your design choices, release process, and support model. Sound Like You? You believe the best platform work makes everyone else faster. You're energized by the challenge of building software that has to work in environments you can't see or control. You want to take a product customers depend on and make it dramatically easier to build, ship, and run, both for them and for the teams whose services live inside it. If that sounds like you, let's talk. Canada Base Pay Range $195,000—$265,000 CAD Expected salary range for San Francisco and the surrounding area. US SF Bay Area (Metro Zone 3) $205,000—$285,000 USD Expected salary range for specific metro areas including Boston, Washington DC, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, and Seattle. These metro areas may change periodically. US Metro Zone 2 $200,000—$275,000 USD Expected pay range for all other US locations not falling into Metro Zone 3 or Metro Zone 2. US General $180,000—$250,000 USD We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and pr