Lead Engineer, CMS Builder

About Us

Circle is building the world’s leading all-in-one platform for online communities. We make it possible for creators, coaches, educators, and businesses to bring together their audience with engaging discussions, live streams, events, chat, courses, and payments — all in one place, all under their own brand.

We’re proud to be a fully remote company of around 180 (and growing!) team members from 30+ countries around the world. We seek exceptional individuals around the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, create a meaningful impact in their own lives. We don't track hours, but we do manage for high expectations very closely. We collaborate across time zones, are highly async, and like to document a lot.

Twice a year, we bring the whole company together in beautiful places around the world for our company offsites. So far, we’ve hosted offsites in Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, Thailand, Colombia, Italy, Ireland, and more, with still more to come!

About the role

• Visual development environment that produces code cleaner than most developers write by hand.
• AI-powered design system that uses a prebuilt block library to suggest layouts that are actually consistent and convert.
• Performance architecture where sites load faster than static HTML through intelligent edge rendering.

What you'll be doing

• Architect the system that needs to scale from simple landing pages to dynamic community dashboards
• Build and mentor a world-class team of engineers who share your obsession with craft
• Drive technical decisions that balance innovation with reliability at massive scale

• Partner with design and product to define what visual development means in 2025 and beyond
• Use data and user insights to constantly evolve the product—not just build what's requested
• Push boundaries on what's possible in browser-based development tools
• Drive the evolution from simple page builder to a comprehensive platform that powers entire community experiences

• Own metrics that matter: creator success, publish rates, site performance, and platform growth
• Build features that directly drive Circle's expansion from community platform to creator OS
• Enable non-technical users to build professional web experiences
• Create competitive moats through technical excellence and user experience

What you'll need to be successful

• Strong alignment with our values, find our values on our career page if you haven’t read up on them yet.
• You are proficient in English (spoken, written, and reading) at a CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5.

• You've architected visual editors, design tools, or similar complex front-end systems
• You know how to make 60fps interactions feel native in a browser environment
• You've dealt with the edge cases that come with user-generated content at scale

• You see a drag-and-drop editor as a visual programming language
• You understand how design systems, component libraries, and visual tools create compound value
• You can architect for flexibility without creating an unmaintainable mess
• You know when to build, when to buy, and when to innovate

• You write code that serves as the quality bar for the entire team
• You mentor engineers through hands-on collaboration and thoughtful code reviews
• You can recruit world-class talent because they want to work with you
• You communicate complex technical concepts in ways that energize rather than confuse

• Deep expertise in modern JavaScript/TypeScript and React ecosystem
• Experience with Ruby on Rails or similar backend frameworks at scale
• Understanding of browser performance optimization, rendering pipelines, and modern CSS
• Bonus: Experience with visual programming, AST manipulation, or code generation

$160,000 - $170,000 USD per year

The cash compensation range shown is a starting point. In addition to equity, benefits and perks, your cash compensation is subject to an annual review and increase on a once per year basis.

The fun stuff

• Fully remote: work from anywhere in the world!
• Autonomy and trust to do your job: we care about outcomes over everything else.
• Paid time away: all employees are given 35 days of PTO annually. We also offer a paid sabbatical after 5 years.
• Generous U.S. benchmarked compensation and startup equity no matter where you are in the world.*
• Awesome medical coverage with 100% coverage for you and your family, or medical reimbursement options where applicable!*
• Parental leave for parents expanding their family, or just starting one.
• Home office stipend to help you get up and running.
• Learning & development stipend to help you level up your professional skills.
• Annual bonus potential for roles that don't already receive variable income or commission.
• Company retreats: Twice a year, the Circle team gets together for a fully paid company retreat in incredible places around the world! We’ve had past retreats in Colombia, Portugal, and Mexico, with more planned on the horizon.
• Check out our Careers page for more.

*Your role, location and unique circumstance may affect this.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

As a fully-remote international company, diversity is baked into our DNA. Here’s how our CEO, Sid Yadav, frames our hiring mission: “let’s find talent in underserved and under-represented corners of the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, change their life.” To achieve this hiring mission, we offer competitive U.S. benchmarked compensation no matter where someone’s located in the world, and we proactively seek candidates who expand representation of backgrounds, cultures and lived experiences in our teams.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Circle is an equal opportunity employer and as such, we do 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 any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.