Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform

Circle • San Francisco, CA

2d • $195,000 - $236,667 • Remote

About The Position

Circle is seeking a hands-on engineering manager to lead its Identity & Access Platform team. The team builds customer identity and access capabilities used across Circle Hub, Circle Mint, Custody, the Cross-Chain Payments Network, and the Developer Console. Its systems support sign-up and sign-in, sessions and API credentials, service-to-service authentication, enterprise SSO, organizations and workspaces, user and role management, and policy-based approvals and access for money movement. The team is also extending these capabilities to AI agents, including agent identities, bounded authority, short-lived credentials, and auditable actions linked to responsible people or organizations.

The role combines people management with technical leadership. The manager will set technical direction for authentication, authorization, customer identity, and emerging agent identity capabilities; manage and develop a team of backend and frontend engineers; and partner with Security and product teams. The manager will remain engaged in technical work through architecture decisions, design and code reviews, debugging, incident response, and occasional implementation, with a strong AI focus. They will work closely with the team’s Staff Engineer and Team Lead and help the broader organization understand Circle’s identity systems.

Circle describes itself as a financial platform company building digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure, including USDC, Circle Payments Network, and Arc. It emphasizes integrity, a future-forward approach, multistakeholder thinking, mindfulness, and excellence, and offers a flexible work environment. The position is remote, as indicated by the posting’s #LI-Remote tag.

Requirements

• At least three years of experience managing software engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and developing senior individual contributors.
• Experience leading a team through a significant migration, re-platforming, or architectural change.
• Substantial hands-on experience building identity, authentication, authorization, or access-control systems at scale.
• Experience with one or more relevant areas such as OAuth 2.x and OIDC, SAML and enterprise SSO, session and token design, API credentials, service or workload identity, MFA and passkeys, or policy and entitlement engines.
• Strong architectural judgment, including experience designing systems used by other teams and explaining trade-offs, migration and adoption approaches, and potential improvements.
• Recent technical involvement in designing, prototyping, reviewing, or shipping production code; ability to critically review code and designs and help debug difficult authentication or authorization issues.
• Experience addressing real-world identity and authorization security problems and changing system design or operating practices in response.
• Understanding that security monitoring requires more than tracking errors and latency.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including writing useful design documents, explaining complex systems plainly, and giving leadership direct recommendations.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with Okta, Auth0, or an equivalent customer identity platform, including hosted-versus-custom architecture decisions, organization-level policies, or extensibility mechanisms.
• Experience with AI agent identity, delegated authorization, workload identity, service identity, or other non-human identity systems.
• A point of view on agent registration and lifecycle, delegation chains, least privilege, token scoping, revocation, auditability, and preserving accountability when agents act on behalf of people or organizations.
• Experience building or operating systems in which software agents or automated services take consequential actions under bounded authority.
• Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, or another regulated environment where KYC/KYB, entitlements, auditability, and operational controls are part of the product.
• Familiarity with identity and authorization patterns such as on-behalf-of token exchange, MCP authorization, SPIFFE/SPIRE, workload identity federation, agent registries, or policy engines such as OPA or Cedar.
• Experience with Java or Kotlin backend systems and modern TypeScript frontend applications.
• Experience leading a geographically distributed team.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for Circle’s identity and access platform.
• Manage, coach, and grow a team of backend and frontend engineers; set expectations, provide feedback, develop senior engineers into technical leaders, and hire.
• Stay close to code and production systems by leading technical designs, reviewing critical code paths, debugging production issues, participating in incident response, and building prototypes or implementing solutions when appropriate.
• Partner with Security, Product, Onboarding, Risk, and product engineering teams integrating with identity.
• Sequence competing requests into a roadmap and explain the trade-offs behind prioritization.
• Run the team’s delivery process, including planning, scoping, migrations, cutovers, rollback plans, and status reporting.
• Improve engineering practices, operational readiness, and the reliability of platform capabilities provided to the rest of Circle.
• Help the broader organization understand how identity works at Circle.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed