Lead Engineer, Applied AI

Job Description

Job Description

About Us

Circle is building the world's leading all-in-one platform for online communities. We make it possible for creators, coaches, educators, and businesses to bring together their audience with engaging discussions, live streams, events, chat, courses, and payments — all in one place, all under their own brand.

We're proud to be a fully remote company of around 200 (and growing!) team members from 30+ countries around the world. We seek exceptional individuals around the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, create a meaningful impact in their own lives. We don't track hours, but we do manage for high expectations very closely. We collaborate across time zones, are highly async, and like to document a lot.

Twice a year, we bring the whole company together in beautiful places around the world for our company offsites. So far, we've hosted offsites in Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, Thailand, Colombia, Italy, Ireland, and more, with still more to come!

Check out our Careers page for more about working at Circle.

About the role

The Applied AI team at Circle is at the forefront of leveraging AI to drive innovation for our customers through transformative applications of large language models (LLMs).

We're looking for a strong full-stack engineer who is proficient in web frameworks, backend development, and infrastructure to spearhead the development of full-stack AI solutions across Circle. You will work on exciting projects such as AI agents, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, internal tooling for customer-facing teams, fine-tuning models, and building infrastructure for LLM inference. You'll also lead and manage the Applied AI engineering team, currently a team of 3 engineers, with an ambitious and growing roadmap.

While AI experience is valuable, what we care about most is a strong experimentation mindset. If you're excited about rapidly testing ideas, running A / B experiments, and iterating on real production use cases of LLMs, this role is for you.

What you'll be doing

• Ship full-stack AI projects end-to-end on a product built in Ruby on Rails backend and React frontend.
• Design and run experiments (including A / B tests on AI evals or other metrics) to validate AI features, measure impact, and guide iteration.
• Build and integrate components for AI infrastructure and optimize them for performance and reliability to support production-level inferencing.
• Improve processes, tools, and systems to scale AI features into production-ready solutions.
• Help us stay up-to-date with the cutting-edge AI research, techniques, and tools.
• Work closely with Circle's leaders throughout the feature design process.
• Work closely with our designers to create a world-class user experience.
• Foster a bias for action by prioritizing speed of iteration, experimentation, and learning, while maintaining high standards of code quality and user experience.

What you'll need to be successful

$180,000 - $220,000 USD per year

The cash compensation range shown is a starting point. In addition to equity, benefits and perks, your cash compensation is subject to an annual review and increase on a once per year basis.

The fun stuff

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

As a fully-remote international company, diversity is baked into our DNA. Here's how our CEO, Sid Yadav, frames our hiring mission : "let's find talent in underserved and under-represented corners of the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, change their life." To achieve this hiring mission, we offer competitive U.S. benchmarked compensation no matter where someone's located in the world, and we proactively seek candidates who expand representation of backgrounds, cultures and lived experiences in our teams.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Circle is an equal opportunity employer and as such, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. If you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

How We Use Candidate Data

At Circle, we are committed to protecting your personal information. As a job applicant, the personal data you provide to us is collected and processed in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) . This notice outlines the types of personal information we collect, the purpose for collecting it, and your rights.

Information We Collect : We collect the following categories of personal information from job applicants :

Purpose of Collection : We collect this information for the following purposes :

Your Rights Under GDPR and CCPA : You have the following rights regarding your personal information :

For more information about how we handle your personal data or to exercise your rights, please refer to our full Privacy Policy.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this privacy notice.