Staff Software Engineer, Delivery Engineering

CircleCI Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

CircleCI is expanding its Delivery Engineering team to advance the agentic software development lifecycle. We design and build shared tooling that enables engineers to work with AI agents at the core of how we develop, test, and deploy software.

The team is small, senior, and focused on practical, scalable improvements that ripple across CircleCI. You will shape workflows, influence tooling choices, and mentor engineers in adopting agentic practices.

Qualifications

• Direct experience driving agentic developer experience efforts. You've driven an initiative that changed how an engineering organization builds software with AI agents.

Responsibilities

• 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 CircleCI builds software with agents. Help define the end-to-end agentic SDLC, from identifying a change through planning, execution, pull request, merge, and measuring impact afterward. Evaluate shared tooling and patterns, and help decide what teams standardize on.
• Start from how our teams actually work. Spend time with engineering teams to understand their workflows and where they get stuck. Use what you learn to drive decisions and direction that teams adopt because the work fits how they operate.
• Build platforms, not one-offs. Build and support shared tooling that other teams depend on, and own its adoption as much as its delivery. A tool nobody uses isn't done.
• Measure what matters. Instrument agent usage and outcomes so we know what improves throughput and quality and what just burns tokens. Treat cost, model choice, and reliability as design concerns.
• Make build-vs-buy calls. Evaluate models, vendors, and open-source tools against our needs, and choose the path that gets engineers the most leverage.
• Lead through influence. Write the design docs, lead technical discussions across teams, and mentor engineers across the org as they adopt agentic workflows.

Job description

About CircleCI Engineering

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 Delivery Engineering

Delivery Engineering enables CircleCI engineers to deliver quickly, confidently, and securely. We provide the tools and resources that make standard patterns and best practices simple to adopt, and we reduce toil.

Our current focus is the agentic software development lifecycle: how changes are found, planned, built, reviewed, merged, and measured as AI agents take on more of the work. We evaluate the harnesses, repository patterns, skills, and agentic tooling available, decide what our teams should standardize on, and build and support the shared tooling other teams depend on.

We're a small, very senior team, and everyone on it shapes where we go. Every improvement we make compounds across the organization.

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 CircleCI builds software with agents. Help define the end-to-end agentic SDLC, from identifying a change through planning, execution, pull request, merge, and measuring impact afterward. Evaluate shared tooling and patterns, and help decide what teams standardize on.
• Start from how our teams actually work. Spend time with engineering teams to understand their workflows and where they get stuck. Use what you learn to drive decisions and direction that teams adopt because the work fits how they operate.
• Build platforms, not one-offs. Build and support shared tooling that other teams depend on, and own its adoption as much as its delivery. A tool nobody uses isn't done.
• Measure what matters. Instrument agent usage and outcomes so we know what improves throughput and quality and what just burns tokens. Treat cost, model choice, and reliability as design concerns.
• Make build-vs-buy calls. Evaluate models, vendors, and open-source tools against our needs, and choose the path that gets engineers the most leverage.
• Lead through influence. Write the design docs, lead technical discussions across teams, and mentor engineers across the org as they adopt agentic workflows.

What You’ll Bring

Direct experience driving agentic developer experience efforts. You've driven an initiative that changed how an engineering organization builds software with AI agents. You can speak to what you b