Staff Backend Engineer

About Circuit
Circuit is building the world’s first company-centric knowledge network. Our AI-powered platform turns fragmented information into actionable knowledge that can be securely shared across partners, vendors, and customers. Backed by a senior team and early enterprise traction, we’re moving fast, and we’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help us scale our backend infrastructure as we onboard more customers and expand our agentic capabilities.

The Role
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping and scaling Circuit’s backend systems and infrastructure. You’ll own complex backend services built primarily in Go, with a focus on resilience, scalability, and performance under increasing load. A significant portion of Circuit’s agentic functionality lives in the backend, and you’ll be instrumental in ensuring it can evolve and handle new levels of demand.

Our teams operate with a high degree of independence and ownership. Engineers are expected to communicate early and clearly to avoid surprises, act with urgency, and fix issues without waiting to be asked. We hold a high bar for quality while shipping frequently, testing assumptions early, and learning quickly from real-world feedback. You’ll often work through ambiguity by framing problems, asking the right questions, and making progress with incomplete information. Curiosity and internal drive matter: we expect engineers to deeply understand the systems they build, the customers they serve, and how their work creates real-world impact.

Key Responsibilities:
• Lead design, implementation, and scaling of backend infrastructure and services, primarily in Go.
• Ensure backend systems are resilient, observable, and performant under high customer load.
• Drive architectural decisions for long-term scalability and maintainability.
• Contribute significant code to core backend systems, focusing on efficiency, robustness, and developer velocity.
• Establish and promote engineering best practices across the backend team.
• Collaborate closely with product, ML, and frontend teams to deliver high-quality features.
• Mentor and support other engineers, fostering growth and knowledge sharing.

Experience:
• Proven track record turning ambiguous problem statements into shipped, reliable backend systems, owning work end-to-end from design through production.
• Significant expertise in Go, with deep knowledge of performance optimization, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Experience running services at scale (thousands to millions of requests per second), anticipating scalability, reliability and downstream system impactStrong background in service-oriented architecture, microservices, and API design, with a systems-level view of lifecycle costs and long-term maintainability.
• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience designing observable and operable systems, using metrics, logs, traces, testing, and alerts to detect and diagnose issues early. (Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc.).Experience with databases (SQL and NoSQL) and designing data-intensive systems.
• Hands-on experience stepping outside core backend ownership into one or more of infrastructure (cloud, IaC), ML systems (Python), or frontend (React) to solve integration problems, unblock teams, and directly implement features end-to-end when that is the fastest path to impact.

Human Skills:
• Team first, low ego. Optimizes for team and company outcomes over individual wins; challenges ideas with data and reasoning, shares context early, and commits fully once decisions are made.
• Strong sense of ownership; takes responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks, acts with urgency without waiting to be asked, and leaves systems better than they found them.
• Bias to action and learning; ships frequently, tests high-impact assumptions early, and uses small, safe-to-fail experiments to learn from real feedback.
• Customer-impact focused; cares deeply about how reliability, latency, and correctness shape real-world user outcomes and trust.
• Intrinsically motivated; maintains momentum without external pressure and pushes work through ambiguity to real outcomes.
• Curious and continuously learning; seeks deep understanding of the product, systems, and users, and challenges assumptions in pursuit of better results.

What We Offer:
• Early-Stage Ownership: Join at the ground floor of a company with real traction and momentum.
• Empowered Culture: We value autonomy, candor, and craft. You'll be trusted to lead.
• Cutting-Edge Tech: Work with the latest in AI, backend systems, and intelligent infrastructure.
• Meaningful Impact: Shape a platform that transforms how organizations activate knowledge.
• Holistic Benefits: Competitive comp, equity, 100% paid healthcare, 401K, flexible PTO, and a team that truly cares.

Equal-Opportunity Employer
We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Who Should Apply
If you’re a senior backend engineer with deep Go expertise, excited about scaling infrastructure under real-world load, and motivated to shape the future of agentic systems at a fast-moving startup, we’d love to hear from you!