Senior Software Engineer, Query

CircleCI; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

CircleCI is seeking a backend data platform engineer in the United States. You will build AI-native data systems, design scalable storage, and own ingestion pipelines to support analytics for product teams and customers.

You will work with ClickHouse, Temporal, and observability tooling to ensure low latency and reliability at scale. Strong Go experience and leadership are essential for shaping architecture and mentoring others.

Qualifications

• Experience building data-intensive systems such as ingestion pipelines or analytical datastores.
• Strong Go backend skills and ability to design scalable services.
• Experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, and storage design.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-natively; make AI the default for problems.
• Shape and Harden storage layer; optimize for production-scale data.
• Own data ingestion from event streams and durable workflows.
• Serve data to product teams and customers with fast, scalable access.
• Lead design discussions and set architectural direction.
• Champion observability using Honeycomb, Datadog, Rollbar.

Skills

AI-native engineering

Data-intensive systems

Go backend

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Production backends

Tools

ClickHouse

Temporal

Honeycomb

Datadog

Rollbar

React

TypeScript

Job description

About CircleCI

EngineeringCI/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 Query Team

Every pipeline, job, and test that runs on CircleCI generates data, and that history is one of our biggest advantages in an agentic software delivery lifecycle. Flaky test detection, test insights, pipeline search, and agents that reason about why a build failed all depend on fast, reliable access to it.The Query team owns the system that makes this possible. We pull product data out of the transactional services that create it and store it in datastores built for historical and analytical workloads. We serve it through domain-level APIs to CircleCI's product teams and to customers through our public API. Our goal is to make storing data "fire and forget" for every other team, and querying it fast and dependable at a scale that keeps growing.

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 problems get approached and solved.
• Shape how we store data at scale. Own and harden our ClickHouse-based storage layer. Design schemas for known and emerging access patterns, and tune ingestion and query performance to support production-scale data.
• Build the pipelines that move our data. Design and own ingestion from event streams and durable workflows built on Temporal. Data should arrive reliably, stay queryable while it's in transit, and never slow down the critical path of the services that produce it.
• Serve data to the product and to customers. Evolve our platform into the default path for historical queries. Make getting historical data easy, not a bottleneck. Teams should be able to get what they need quickly and with minimal hand-holding, while Query keeps enough visibility into how the data is used to optimize ingestion and reads across every consumer. Build in the indexing, caching, and tiered storage required to keep it performant.
• Set technical direction. When the problem is complex or the answer isn't obvious, you lead the design discussion, write up the architecture decision, and make the call. You help decide which data domain we migrate next and how.
• Champion observability. Use Honeycomb, Datadog, and Rollbar to understand ingestion lag, query latency, and data correctness. For a data platform, operational data drives stability, not just incident response.
• Keep things moving. You take ambiguous data problems from design to production quickly, and you help the people around you move faster too.

What You'll Bring

• 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.
• Hands-on data experience. You've built or owned data-intensive systems such as ingestion pipelines, event-driven architectures, or analytical and time-series datastores. You understand the tradeoffs between transactional and analytical storage, and you've designed schemas and tuned queries for high-volume workloads. Experience with ClickHouse or another columnar database is a strong plus.
• Backend depth in Go. You're strong in Go, or strong in a comparable language and eager to work in Go: interface design, data modeling, service integration, and concurrency. Familiarity with React and TypeScript is a plus, since you'll occasionally work on the product surfaces that display this data.
• Distributed systems judgment. You understand delivery guarantees, idempotency, backpressure, and failure recovery. You know when to rely on a framework's reliability guarantees rather than building your own.
• Technical leadership. You've led the design of complex systems and made tradeoffs deliberately. You leave foundations others can build on. You raise the quality bar through reviews, mentoring, and direct feedback, not just through the code you write.
• A track record of shipping. 5+ years building and operating production backend systems. Your work has served real users, and you've treated latency, reliability, and correctness as design concerns.

Sound like you?

You care about how data powers the product, not just where it lives. You know how to make a datastore fast at scale, and have tuned schemas and queries against real production load. You think like a platform engineer, measuring your work by how much it unblocks the teams building on it. AI isn't a tool you reach for occasionally; it's a core part of how you approach and solve problems.

Canada Base Pay Range

$156,500-$215,000 CAD

Expected salary range for San Francisco and the surrounding area.

US SF Bay Area (Metro Zone 3)

$185,000-$255,000 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

$175,000-$245,000 USD

Expected pay range for all other US locations not falling into Metro Zone 3 or Metro Zone 2.

US General

$165,000-$225,000 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 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, ThresholdVentures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital, Next Equity Partners, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal Capital. CircleCI is an Equal Opportunity and Aff… We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

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