Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform

Circle Internet Financial • San Francisco, CA

12h • Remote

About The Position

Circle is seeking a hands-on engineering manager to lead the team responsible for its customer identity and access platform. The platform supports Circle products including Circle Hub, Circle Mint, Custody, the Cross-Chain Payments Network, and the Developer Console. Its capabilities include sign-up and sign-in, sessions and API credentials, service-to-service authentication, enterprise SSO, organizations and workspaces, user and role management, and a Policy Engine governing approvals and access for money movement.

The role will set technical direction for authentication, authorization, customer identity, and emerging AI agent identity capabilities. The manager will lead and develop a team of backend and frontend engineers, partner with Security and product teams, and remain technically involved through design and code reviews, debugging, incident response, prototyping, and occasional implementation. This is a product and platform engineering role focused on systems at the intersection of customer experience, security, reliability, and financial risk. The manager will work closely with the Staff Engineer and Team Lead and help the broader organization understand how identity works at Circle.

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 relevant identity capabilities or technologies 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.
• Experience designing a system that other teams built on, with the ability to explain trade-offs, migration and adoption, and potential improvements to the design.
• Ability to stay close to production systems, critically review code and designs, and help debug difficult authentication or authorization issues.
• Recent experience designing, prototyping, reviewing, or shipping production code.
• Experience dealing with real-world identity and authorization security problems and changing system design or operating models in response.
• Understanding that security monitoring requires more than tracking errors and latency.
• Ability to write useful design documents, explain complex systems plainly, and give leadership direct recommendations.
• Strong communication and architectural judgment.

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 accountability when agents act for people or organizations.
• Experience building or operating systems where 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, give feedback, develop senior engineers into technical leaders, and hire.
• Stay close to the code and systems by leading technical designs, reviewing critical code paths, debugging production issues, participating in incident response, and building prototypes when useful.
• Partner with Security, Product, Onboarding, Risk, and product engineering teams that integrate with identity.
• Sequence competing requests into a roadmap and explain the trade-offs behind it.
• Run the team’s delivery process, including planning, scoping, migrations, cutovers, rollback plans, and status reporting.
• Improve engineering practices, operational readiness, and the team’s ability to provide reliable platform capabilities.
• Make architecture decisions and communicate trade-offs clearly.
• 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