Principle Software Engineer , Backend

Founded in 2014, Circles is a global technology company reimagining the telco industry with its innovative SaaS platform, empowering telco operators worldwide to effortlessly launch innovative digital brands or refresh existing ones, accelerating their transformation into techcos.

Today, Circles partners with leading telco operators across multiple countries and continents, including KDDI Corporation, Etisalat Group (e&), AT&T, and Telkomsel, creating blueprints for future telco and digital experiences enjoyed by millions of consumers globally.

Besides its SaaS business, Circles operates three other distinct businesses:

• Circles.Life: A wholly-owned digital lifestyle telco brand based in Singapore, Circles.Life is powered by Circles’ SaaS platform and pioneering go-to-market strategies. It is the digital market leader in Singapore and has won numerous awards for marketing, customer service, and innovative product offerings beyond connectivity.

• Circles Aspire: A global provider of Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solutions. Its cloud-based Experience Cloud platform enables enterprises, service providers and developers to deliver and scale mobile, messaging, IoT, and connectivity services worldwide.

• Jetpac: Specializing in travel tech solutions, Jetpac provides seamless eSIM roaming for over 200 destinations and innovative travel lifestyle products, redefining connectivity for digital travelers. Jetpac was awarded Travel eSIM of the Year.

Circles is backed by renowned global investors, including Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia), Warburg Pincus, Founders Fund, and EDBI (the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), with a track record of backing industry challengers.

• Domain Technical Vision: Define, communicate, and drive the medium-to-long-term technical roadmap and architectural evolution for your core domain. This vision must align with the Director's strategy and the overall business goals.
• Architectural Accountability: Serve as the highest technical authority for your domain. You are personally accountable for the design, integrity, resilience, security, and especially the cost-efficiency of your systems at a global scale.
• Technical Problem Solving: Dive into the most complex and ambiguous production issues or architectural roadblocks across the organization. Your role is to provide the final, correct solution or direction that unlocks other teams.
• Hands-On Code Fluency: While your primary role is leadership, you must maintain expert-level proficiency in Java/Spring Boot and distributed patterns to effectively guide technical decisions and mentor your team's Staff and Senior engineers.

• Hiring & Talent Quality: Own the hiring pipeline for your team. You are key to defining and maintaining the technical bar for all engineers joining the domain, actively participating in high-level interviews.
• Team Health & Culture: Foster a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and accountability. Resolve team conflicts and actively manage performance to ensure a healthy, high-performing environment.
• Delivery & Execution: Be fully accountable for the team's delivery. Partner with Product Management to translate strategic vision into achievable technical milestones and ensure execution is predictable and on time.

• Operational Ownership: Instill a mindset of extreme operational ownership. Ensure services are adequately monitored, SLOs are met, and your team effectively handles incident response, performing rigorous Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
• Stakeholder Alignment: Influence technical decisions up to the Director level and laterally across peer engineering managers and other Principal engineers. You must clearly articulate technical trade-offs, risks, and strategic value to non-technical stakeholders.

• Strategic proficiency in one or more highly performant languages (e.g., Java, Go/Kotlin) for use in critical, low-latency services or cross-domain initiatives.
• Global Scale Resilience: Expert knowledge in designing, implementing, and defending systems that meet five-nines (99.999%) availability and operate across multi-region/multi-cloud deployments. Expert understanding of data consistency models (e.g., Eventual Consistency) and geo-distributed databases.
• Advanced Cloud Engineering (AWS/GCP focus): Expertise in infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) and modern container orchestration (Kubernetes). Proven ability to design and govern CI/CD pipelines that achieve high deployment frequency and low failure rates.
• Data Strategy & Data Flow Governance: Mastery of various database technologies, including advanced indexing and replication strategies. Expertise in real-time data streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for high-throughput, low-latency processing and analysis.
• Proactive Security & Observability: Expert-level knowledge of security best practices (e.g., OWASP Top 10) applied at the architectural layer. You must define the standards for Observability (logging, tracing via OpenTelemetry/Jaeger, and custom metrics) for your entire domain.
• Performance Engineering: Proven history of identifying and eliminating complex performance bottlenecks (code, database, network) in high-volume production environments. Experience with advanced profiling and benchmarking tools.

• Java/Spring Boot: Expert-level proficiency is required, especially for hands-on code fluency.
• Highly Performant Languages: Strategic proficiency in languages like Java, Go, or Kotlin.

• Cloud Engineering: Expertise in AWS/GCP.
• Container Orchestration: Expertise in Kubernetes.

• Real-time Data Streaming Architectures: Expertise in systems like Kafka.
• Database Technologies: Mastery of various database technologies, including advanced indexing and replication strategies, NoSQL, SQL

• Observability: Defining standards for Observability (logging, tracing via OpenTelemetry/Jaeger, and custom metrics).
• Security: Expert-level knowledge of security best practices (e.g., OWASP Top 10) at the architectural layer.
• Performance Engineering: Experience with advanced profiling and benchmarking tools (e.g., JProfiler)

Circles is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, disability or age.

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To all recruitment agencies: Circles will only acknowledge resumes shared by recruitment agencies if selected in our preferred supplier partnership program.

Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Circles, employees or any other company location. Circles will not be held accountable for any fees related to unsolicited resumes not uploaded via our ATS.