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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 Role
We're looking for an Engineering Manager who will own the holistic user experiences where customers interact with CircleCI. They will play a critical role in shaping how customers perceive and adopt CircleCI, directly impacting retention and expansion.
This leadership role requires staying close to the work as you build a high-trust, highly competent, and cohesive team while delivering meaningful product improvements at startup speed.
What You'll Be Doing
Responsibilities
This role is a people-management position focused on engineering strategy, team performance, and the development of engineers. Some of your tasks and responsibilities will include:
- People Development: Attract, onboard, and retain diverse top talent. Build psychological safety and trust within the team so engineers can take smart risks, give candid feedback, and do their best work. Develop people through coaching, mentoring, and management support. Conduct regular 1:1s, goal setting, and feedback conversations with engineers and support them in their career paths. Continuously work to improve inclusion and belonging.
- Business Value Delivery: Ensure incremental value delivery and high-quality standards for the team while supporting strategic work in collaboration with partners in Design, Product, and Data. Balance speed with sustainability – we move fast, but we ship work we're proud of. Track performance metrics and identify opportunities for optimization and continuous improvement.
- Customer and Stakeholder Engagement: Engage with stakeholders and customers to gather feedback, understand needs, and ensure engineering initiatives align with business objectives. For Web Experiences, this means staying connected to how customers actually use our product and translating those insights into team priorities.
- Process and Collaboration: Maintain high levels of transparency and efficiency with other development teams, product managers, and other stakeholders. You'll also be involved in broader organizational development and cross-team initiatives with the rest of our engineering management team.
- Technical Enablement: AI-native engineering isn't a nice-to-have on this team – you hold your engineers to that bar, use AI tools yourself to evaluate technical direction and pressure-test decisions, and help the team adopt practices that actually accelerate their work rather than just feel productive. Help grow the team's expertise in frontend performance, reliability, and maintainable architecture. Champion the use of observability tools like Honeycomb and Datadog so operational data – not guesswork – drives technical decisions. You don't need to write the ADR, but you make sure one gets written, you push back when the reasoning is weak, and you're a credible tiebreaker when the team is split.
- People Management: You have prior experience in a people management role. You know how to build cohesive teams where people trust each other and hold each other accountable. Bonus points if you have done so in a fast-paced startup environment.
- Delivery: You do not "boil the ocean" but prefer to deliver solutions incrementally, with experimentation and iteration along the way. You know modern software engineering practices and how to apply them to drive effective, timely, high-quality delivery. Experience with agile methodologies is an asset.
- AI-Native Mindset: You haven't waited for AI to mature, and you don't let your team wait either. You can speak to how AI tools change what "shipping fast" actually means; you've formed real opinions on where they help and where they fall short; and you hold your engineers accountable for using them well – as part of how the team operates, not a bonus skill.
- Technical Leadership: We don't expect you to write or review code, but you're technical enough to earn your team's trust – you understand and question architecture decisions based on company goals, anticipate pitfalls, and are a credible tiebreaker when the team is split. You mentor engineers, give direct feedback on technical direction, and raise the quality bar through how you engage in reviews and design discussions, not just what you ship.
- Communication: You believe in open and honest communication and work to cultivate this within the team and organization. You approach everything with an open mind and listen to different perspectives before determining a path forward.
- Product Thinking: You bring product instincts to every decision by identifying what matters to developers, shaping priorities, and pushing back when a direction doesn't serve the user.
- Learning: You bring action orientation and seek to continuously improve the teams you work with. You excel in a culture centered on open communication, strong feedback, quick experimentation, blamelessness, and embracing failure to learn from it.
- Remote Work: CircleCI is a remote-first company, and you should have experience leading and motivating a distributed team.
- Experience managing frontend-leaning full-stack teams: You have experience working on/leading teams - ideally with modern frontend frameworks (React, TypeScript, etc.). You can ask the right questions, spot quality issues, and raise the bar on frontend craft even if you're not writing code daily.
You've stopped waiting for AI to mature and are already building with it, not as a productivity trick, but as a core part of how you think about problems. You care about the product as much as the code. You're drawn to work where the patterns don't exist yet and the best answer requires you to invent it – and you're ready to bring others along with you. If that's how you already operate, we want to talk.
Canada Base Pay Range
$166,000—$207,750 CAD
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 privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
About CircleCI
CircleCI is the world’s largest continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the hub where code moves from idea to delivery. As one of the most-used DevOps tools - processing more than 3 million jobs a day - CircleCI has unique access to data on how the most effective engineering teams work, and the tools to help software companies successfully leverage the power of AI into their commercial applications. Companies like Hinge, HuggingFace, and Samsung use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster.
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco with a global, remote workforce, CircleCI is venture-backed by Base10, Greenspring Associates, Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold
Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital, Next Equity Partners, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal Capital.
CircleCI is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual 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.
