Staff Software Engineer at Supercircle

Empregara; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

SuperCircle is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (or Principal) to own substantial parts of our platform from API surfaces to frontend workflows. You will lead architecture, mentor engineers, and help scale our AI-assisted development practices, with a strong emphasis on delivery and collaboration within NYC teams.

You’ll be based in New York City, hybrid work, and collaborate with an engineering team that includes remote members as we scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering with leadership experience
• Experience owning end-to-end systems including design, rollout, and on-call
• Strong background building scalable APIs and front-end applications
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and drive architectural decisions

Responsibilities

• Own and ship meaningful surface area of the platform end-to-end — APIs, web apps, services, workflows
• Lead technical design for new domains and service boundaries
• Grow into a technical leader for the NYC team and mentor engineers
• Document architectural decisions and drive engineering best practices
• Build AI-enabled development workflows and ensure safe scale

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

React

GraphQL

REST APIs

AWS

NoSQL

Engineering leadership

Tools

Next.js

Remix

Job description

Role: Staff Software Engineer (Also open to Principal Software Engineers)

Location
: New York City (Hybrid 3 days/week out of our office in FiDi / WSA Building)

Type
: Full-time

Reports To
: CTO

Team
: Engineering

Experience Level
: 10+ years

About SuperCircle

Supercircle is the AI-powered operating system for recovering value from billions of unsold and post-sale products across global retail. Brands lose $170B a year to returned, damaged, and excess inventory, and 60% of products and clothing are burned or landfilled within a year of manufacture date. We are unlocking waste as a value generator rather than a cost center, building a new reverse logistics economy for the world’s leading brands.
Our AI-powered platform is already the de facto partner for the enterprise market trusted by 100+ brands including J.Crew, VF Corp, GUESS, Reformation, FIGS and Parachute, and has already orchestrated the diversion of 12M+ products from t-shirts to basketballs from landfill while returning $50M+ to our partners' P&Ls.
Supercircle is a leading venture backed company in NYC that has raised $40M+ to date from top VCs, including a $24M Series A led by Foundry in 2025 and continuing to grow even faster as we move towards our next round.
Led by multi-time co-founders in tech, retail, fashion, and supply chain, Supercircle’s stacked team includes one of the former founders at Gilt Groupe and operators from companies including Flexport, eBay, Equinox, Gap, The RealReal, Afterpay, Meta and Google.
We are building the rails for an industry that has, until now, run on spreadsheets and pallets — and we're just getting started on the $170B+ in unmanaged inventory and unrecovered value sitting on brands' balance sheets.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer who is a builder first and an engineer second. Someone who gets genuine energy from turning ambiguity into working products, who has already rebuilt their entire workflow around AI, and who asks "why is a human still doing this?" more often than they ask "how should we architect this?"
This role is based in New York City. Candidates must be local to the NYC metro area and able to work from our NYC office. We are not considering remote or relocation candidates for this role.
You’ll be the anchor of our NYC engineering presence — frequently the only engineer in the office, working alongside a collaborative team and a remote engineering team (for now). This role suits someone deeply self-directed and communicative.

What You'll Do

• Own and ship meaningful surface area of the SuperCircle platform end-to-end — APIs, web applications, backend services, warehouse and logistics workflows, and partner integrations
• Lead technical design for new domains: schema design, service boundaries, access patterns, and the written-down rationale that outlives the conversation
• Grow into a technical leader for our NYC team — setting direction and eventually mentoring or leading a small group of engineers as we scale here.
• Drive and document architectural decisions — RFCs, ADRs, and crisp PR descriptions — and bring the team along with low ego and high conviction
• Build and evolve our AI-assisted development workflow, not just as a participant but as the person who designs how the team uses it safely and at scale
• Mentor and sponsor mid-level and senior engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback; raise the bar on testing, observability, and operational discipline
• Engage directly with customers, partners, and commercial conversations — translate what you learn into better product decisions and faster iteration cycles
• Prototype aggressively when the problem is unclear; build for scale when the problem is proven

What We're Looking For

Experience & Leadership

• Typically 8+ years of experience (though we weight trajectory, scope, and ownership over raw tenure) of professional software engineering, with at least 3 years at a staff level at a high-growth or early-stage company
• Demonstrated experience leading technical direction across a team or workstream — you have set the standard, brought others along, and been the person others look to when the hard question has no obvious answer
• A track record of owning systems end-to-end: design, implementation, rollout, on-call, and iteration
• Experience operating close to the product and commercial layers — you have talked to customers, shaped roadmaps, and understood how engineering decisions affect revenue and margin
• Evidence of founder-mode ownership: you have solved problems that weren't your job description because they needed to be solved

Builder Mentality

• Your instinct when handed an ambiguous opportunity is to prototype, not to ask for requirements
• You are comfortable with incomplete information, changing priorities, and undefined markets — you treat these as inputs, not blockers
• You optimize for outcomes over elegance, and for learning velocity over engineering perfection — without being reckless about it
• You know when to prototype, when to build for production, when to scale, and when to refactor — and you make that call out loud

AI-Native Workflow (Non-Negotiable)

• You have rebuilt your development workflow around AI — not added it on top
• Daily, hands-on fluency with Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent agentic coding environments on production codebases
• You have built internal agents, custom skills, MCP servers, or automation tooling for yourself or your team — not as a side project, but as a core part of how you work
• You use AI across engineering, product thinking, research, testing, and documentation — not just for code generation
• You can articulate exactly where AI helps, where it introduces risk, and how to keep human judgment on the decisions that matter
• You think in systems and automation; your default question is "why is a human doing this?"

Engineering Fundamentals

• Deep TypeScript / Node.js expertise — you have debugged the hard cases and written the postmortem
• Production experience with GraphQL or REST APIs at scale — schema design, query performance, versioning strategy
• Production-grade React and modern meta-framework experience (Next.js, Remix) — SSR/SSG tradeoffs, hydration architecture
• Solid AWS or equivalent cloud fluency — serverless compute, IAM, observability, cost
• Strong NoSQL data modeling — you can design a schema for a domain you've never seen before and defend it under questioning

Commercial & Product Instincts

• You think from the user backwards — "what is the fastest way to solve the user's problem?" before "how should we architect this?"
• You understand revenue, margin, unit economics, and enterprise sales cycles — and you enjoy it
• You ask "how does this help us close another $500k account?" as naturally as you ask technical questions
• You can run customer discovery, design workflows, and prototype interfaces — not just build what someone else spec'd

Nice To Have

• Experience with reverse logistics, supply chain, warehouse management, or RFID systems
• Multi-tenant SaaS