Senior Staff Software Engineer Java Jobs in Chicago, IL

Circle (NYSE: CRCL) is one of the world's leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure. Circle's platform includes the world's largest regulated stablecoin network anchored by USDC, Circle Payments Network for global money movement, and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet. Enterprises, financial institutions, and developers use Circle to power trusted, internet-scale financial innovation. Learn more at circle.com.

What you'll be part of:

Circle is committed to visibility and stability in everything we do. As we grow as an organization, we're expanding into some of the world's strongest jurisdictions. Speed and efficiency are motivators for our success and our employees live by our company values: High Integrity, Future Forward, Multistakeholder, Mindful, and Driven by Excellence. We have built a flexible work environment where new ideas are encouraged and everyone is a stakeholder.

Here is our team hierarchy for individual contributors:

Senior Software Engineer (III)

Staff Software Engineer (IV)

Your team is responsible for:

As a member of the Data Platform Engineering team, you own the core Data warehouse platform, data ingestion and processing, ETL/ELT pipelines orchestration platform, data cataloging, data governance. These components power our Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Data Science teams by enabling experimentation, operational excellence, and actionable insights to accelerate business growth.

You'll work on:

• Design, build, and operate data platform services (warehousing, orchestration, and catalogs). Continuously enhance platform operations by improving monitoring, performance, reliability, and resource optimization.

• Design, build and maintain batch and streaming data ingestion framework to source the required data for analytical and operational needs, which include onchain data, internal system data, and partner data.

• Be a domain expert in streaming processing, data pipelines, data warehousing and quality. Work closely across multiple stakeholders-including Product, Engineering, Data Science, Security and Compliance teams-on data contract modeling, data lifecycle management, governance and regulatory/legal compliance.

• Provide ML data platform capabilities for AI/Data Science teams to perform data preparation, model preparation and serving, and performance monitoring.

• Develop and maintain core services and libraries to enhance critical platform functionalities, such as cataloging data assets and lineage, tracking data versioning and quality, managing auto-backfilling, implementing access controls on data assets.

You'll bring to Circle:

Senior Software Engineer (III):

• 4+ years of software engineering experience building data-intensive systems

• Hands-on experience designing and operating scalable batch, micro-batch, or streaming data pipelines

• Experience in business domains such as payment systems, credit cards, bank transfers, or blockchains.

• Familiarity with data governance, lineage, and provenance concepts

• Strong understanding of open-source data technologies and cloud-native data platforms

• Ability to tackle complex and ambiguous problems.

• Self-starter who takes ownership and enjoys moving at a fast pace.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across multiple remote teams, share ideas and present concepts effectively.

Nice to have:

• Experience with with streaming frameworks such as Apache Flink or Google Cloud Dataflow

• Experience with NoSQL databases such as Bigtable, Cassandra

Staff Software Engineer (IV):

Includes all the requirements of a Senior Software Engineer, and:

• 7+ years in software engineering experience for large-scale and complex data systems

• Proven technical leadership in architecture and system design, influencing designs across multiple teams

• Deep expertise in one or more of: streaming systems, data warehousing, data modeling, or large-scale ingestion platforms

• Ability to identify high-impact technical opportunities independently and drive them from concept to production

• Strong experience in:

  • Data platforms integrated with downstream consumers, tools, and services

  • Data quality, validation, and observability mechanisms across pipelines

• Comfortable making and defending long-term architectural tradeoffs in ambiguous environments

Nice to have:

• Hands-on Experience taking an operational, data-intensive application from initial design to production (01), or scaling and operating it at production scale.

• Experience developing real-time analytics or near-real-time decisioning systems

Circle is on a mission to create an inclusive financial future, with transparency at our core. We consider a wide variety of elements when crafting our compensation ranges and total compensation packages.

Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to: relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs. Please note that compensation ranges may differ for candidates in other locations.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, or any other protected status required by the laws in the locations where we hire. Additionally, Circle participates in the E-Verify Program in certain locations, as required by law.

Should you require accommodations or assistance in our interview process because of a disability, please reach out toaccommodations@circle.comfor support. We respect your privacy and will connect with you separately from our interview process to accommodate your needs.

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