--- title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Query at CircleCI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-query-circleci-canada-or-z1ctvdazczwv' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-20' --- # Senior Software Engineer, Query at CircleCI - **Company:** CircleCI - **Location:** Canada OR, United States - **Compensation:** $157k–$255k - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-10-16 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-20 - **Apply:** http://www.circleci.com/careers/jobs/8881777002/?gh_jid=8881777002 ## Job description ## About CircleCI Engineering CI/CD has been solved. Now it's being reinvented. AI agents don't just run pipelines. They write code, trigger builds, interpret failures, and propose fixes. The interfaces that developers use to understand and trust that work don't exist yet. We're building them. At CircleCI, our guiding principles aren't posters on a wall. We learn fast: we run experiments, accept failure, and scale what works. We think like the customer: every decision connects back to the developer sitting in front of a failing build at 2 am. We own the outcome: not just our slice of it, but the whole thing. If that's how you already work, you'll fit here. ## About the Query Team Every pipeline, job, and test that runs on CircleCI generates data, and that history is one of our biggest advantages in an agentic software delivery lifecycle. Flaky test detection, test insights, pipeline search, and agents that reason about why a build failed all depend on fast, reliable access to it. The Query team owns the system that makes this possible. We pull product data out of the transactional services that create it and store it in datastores built for historical and analytical workloads. We serve it through domain-level APIs to CircleCI's product teams and to customers through our public API. Our goal is to make storing data "fire and forget" for every other team, and querying it fast and dependable at a scale that keeps growing. ## What You'll Do - Build AI-natively. AI is how we work. It's not a productivity layer on top of engineering, but the default starting point for how problems get approached and solved. - Shape how we store data at scale. Own and harden our ClickHouse-based storage layer. Design schemas for known and emerging access patterns, and tune ingestion and query performance to support production-scale data. - Build the pipelines that move our data. Design and own ingestion from event streams and durable workflows built on Temporal. Data should arrive reliably, stay queryable while it's in transit, and never slow down the critical path of the services that produce it. - Serve data to the product and to customers. Evolve our platform into the default path for historical queries. Make getting historical data easy, not a bottleneck. Teams should be able to get what they need quickly and with minimal hand-holding, while Query keeps enough visibility into how the data is used to optimize ingestion and reads across every consumer. Build in the indexing, caching, and tiered storage required to keep it performant. - Set technical direction. When the problem is complex or the answer isn't obvious, you lead the design discussion, write up the architecture decision, and make the call. You help decide which data domain we migrate next and how. - Champion observability. Use Honeycomb, Datadog, and Rollbar to understand ingestion lag, query latency, and data correctness. For a data platform, operational data drives stability, not just incident response. - Keep things moving. You take ambiguous data problems from design to production quickly, and you help the people around you move faster too. You don't just patch problems, you ask why they happened. You'll fix the immediate issue, then solve the underlying team practice, process, or system that let it through. ## What You'll Bring - AI-native engineering practices. You use AI tools daily and can speak to what you've built, where they changed your approach, and where they fall short. - Hands-on data experience. You've built or owned data-intensive systems such as ingestion pipelines, event-driven architectures, or analytical and time-series datastores. You understand the tradeoffs between transactional and analytical storage, and you've designed schemas and tuned queries for high-volume workloads. Experience with ClickHouse or another columnar database is a strong plus. - Backend depth in Go. You're strong in Go, or strong in a comparable language and eager to work in Go: interface design, data modeling, service integration, and concurrency. Familiarity with React and TypeScript is a plus, since you'll occasionally work on the product surfaces that display this data. - Distributed systems judgment. You understand delivery guarantees, idempotency, backpressure, and failure recovery. You know when to rely on a framework's reliability guarantees rather than building your own. - Technical leadership. You've led the design of complex systems and made tradeoffs deliberately. You leave foundations others can build on. You raise the quality bar through reviews, mentoring, and direct feedback, not just through the code you write. - A track record of shipping. 5+ years building and operating production backend systems. Your work has served real users, and you've treated latency, reliability, and correctness as design concerns. Sound like you? You care about how data powers the product, not just where it lives. You know how to make a datastore fast at scale, and have tuned schemas and queries against real production load. You think like a platform engineer, measuring your work by how much it unblocks the teams building on it. AI isn't a tool you reach for occasionally; it's a core part of how you approach and solve problems. If that sounds like you, we want to talk. Canada Base Pay Range $156,500—$215,000 CAD Expected salary range for San Francisco and the surrounding area. US SF Bay Area (Metro Zone 3) $185,000—$255,000 USD Expected salary range for specific metro areas including Boston, Washington DC, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, and Seattle. These metro areas may change periodically. US Metro Zone 2 $175,000—$245,000 USD Expected pay range for all other US locations not falling into Metro Zone 3 or Metro Zone 2. US General $165,000—$225,000 USD We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation. ## About CircleCI CircleCI is the world’s largest continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the hub where code moves from idea to delivery. As one of the most-used DevOps tools - processing more than 3 million jobs a day - CircleCI has unique access to data on how the most effective engineering teams work, and the tools to help software companies successfully leverage the power of AI into their commercial applications. Companies like Hinge, HuggingFace, and Samsung use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco with a global, remote workforce, CircleCI is venture-backed by Base10, Greenspring Associates, Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital, Next Equity Partners, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal Capital. CircleCI is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. How CircleCI Uses AI in Hiring At CircleCI, people make our hiring decisions. We use technology to support our recruiting team so they can spend more time on what matters most: getting to know you. Where we may use AI - Job descriptions and messaging: AI may help draft job descriptions and role-specific messaging so they are clear and accurate. - Application review: For some roles, we use an AI tool to review applications, including resumes and application responses, against criteria our hiring team sets for the role. The tool generates a fit score and summary to help recruiters organize and prioritize applications. - Interview notes: With advance notice, an AI note-taking tool may join interviews to record, transcribe, and summarize the conversation. This lets interviewers focus on talking with you. You will be told before each interview, and you may opt out at any stage by letting your recruiter know. If you opt out, the tool will not join, and your candidacy is not affected. - Outreach: AI may help draft candidate outreach and scheduling messages, which our team reviews before sending. Our commitment AI does not make hiring decisions at CircleCI. Our recruiters and hiring teams review candidates and make every decision to advance or reject an application. No candidate is rejected based solely on an AI score. We have tools and processes in place to test for bias and to review how these tools perform, and we adjust our approach as AI technology and the laws that govern it change. ## Your choices You can ask for human-only review of your application, opt out of AI interview note-taking, request an accommodation, or ask questions about how we use AI. Contact recruiting@circleci.com.  For how we handle your data, including retention, see our Privacy Policy. ## About CircleCI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: CircleCI provides a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that enables software teams to automate their build, test, and deployment processes with AI-powered intelligence. - **Entity Type**: Private - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with a globally distributed workforce across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Germany, Mexico, and Japan) - **Founded**: 2011 - **Founders**: Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner ## Core Business - Primary industry: DevOps and CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) Platform - Target customers: B2B, serving engineering teams from startups to the Fortune 500, including software engineers, platform engineers, security engineers, and engineering managers - Mission: To manage change so software teams can innovate faster — enabling engineers to deliver high-quality products reliably and efficiently ## Products & Services - **CircleCI CI/CD Platform**: A cloud-based and on-premise continuous integration and delivery service that automates the building, testing, and deployment of software. The core offering includes intelligent test splitting, parallel execution, and support for Linux, macOS, Android, and Windows environments. - **AI-Powered Agentic CI/CD**: A new generation of the platform featuring autonomous validation, AI agents that diagnose and fix pipeline failures, rollback pipelines for safe recovery, and model evaluation for LLM applications. This includes the CircleCI MCP Server to connect AI tools (like Claude Code) to pipeline data. - **Platform Toolkit**: A set of tools and policies (including no-think CI/CD, golden paths, and policy enforcement) designed to help platform engineers standardize best practices at scale across their organizations. - **Orbs**: Reusable, shareable packages of configuration (YAML) that simplify and streamline CI/CD setup for common deployment targets (AWS, GCP, Azure, Heroku, etc.) and tools. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric**: Over 2 million developers use the platform. The platform has achieved 97% faster test runs. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Investors include Top Tier Capital Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners (from the $100M Series F raised in 2021). Key technology partners include AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and major VCS providers like GitHub and GitLab. - **Growth Signals**: Forbes named CircleCI to "America’s Best Startup Employers" list. The company is actively investing in AI-native features (autonomous agents, MCP integration) and has launched a new CLI and a redesigned Pipelines page. Headcount continues to grow with active hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market roles. ## Competitive Advantages - **Agent-Powered Automation**: A first-to-market move into "autonomous validation" and AI-agent-driven CI/CD, distinguishing CircleCI from traditional, purely script-based CI/CD tools. - **Enterprise-Grade Scale & Trust**: Built to handle the demands of large, complex organizations with rigorous security, compliance, and policy enforcement needs — a critical moat against simpler, less mature alternatives. - **Multi-Platform & Hybrid Cloud Support**: Supports the widest range of environments (Linux, macOS, Android, Windows) in both cloud and self-hosted (on-prem) configurations, giving enterprises flexibility. - **Developer Experience Focus**: Features like Smarter Testing, Chunk testing, and the new Pipelines page emphasize a frictionless, high-velocity developer experience, which drives adoption within engineering teams. ## Strategic Focus - **AI-Native CI/CD**: The company's roadmap is heavily centered on "AI speed." The focus is on integrating AI agents directly into the pipeline (for diagnosis, rollback, and even prompt engineering), making the platform autonomous and "no-think" for developers. - **Platform Engineering & Standardization**: Empowering platform teams to define golden paths and enforce policies, balancing developer velocity with organizational control and safety. - **Expanding the Ecosystem**: Deepening integrations with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and AI tooling (MCP Server, LLM app support) to become the default CI/CD layer for the AI era. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Flexibility**: CircleCI operates on a hybrid model (office-from-home flexibility) designed to balance collaboration with personal productivity. The culture is built on guiding principles: "Learn fast," "Own the outcome," "Understand the problem," "Do our best work," and "Think like the customer." - **Professional Development**: Employees have access to comprehensive training programs, leadership development opportunities, and a clear focus on career pathing (e.g., redesigned engineering career paths). - **Community & Inclusion**: Active Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) include Circle[SHE]i (women and allies), The Onyx Circle (Black employees and allies), CircleAPI (Asian voices), Circle-Sí-I (Latino/LatinX), CircleMinds (neurodiversity), Queer Sphere (LGBTQIA+), and CircleGI (Veterans). - **Benefits & Perks**: Comprehensive benefits package including generous PTO, holistic mental health support, and global health and wellness coverage. ## Sources 1. [circleci.com](https://circleci.com/) — Official website with product overview, brand positioning, and "Join 2mil+ devs" tagline 2. [circleci.com/careers](https://circleci.com/careers/) — Careers page with mission, culture, guiding principles, ERG descriptions, and benefits information 3. [circleci.com/about](https://circleci.com/about/) — About page with leadership team (CEO Jim Rose, CTO Rob Zuber, CFO Chitra Balasubramanian, etc.), company history (founded 2011 in San Francisco), and values 4. [linkedin.com/company/circleci](https://www.linkedin.com/company/circleci) — LinkedIn company page with open positions (10 current job listings including Software Engineer, PM, Product Designer) 5. [circleci.com/docs](https://circleci.com/docs/guides/about-circleci/about-circleci/) — Official documentation providing technical overview, CI/CD definitions, supported platforms (Linux, macOS, Android, Windows), and deployment targets (AWS S3, EC2, GCP, Azure, Heroku, Firebase) ## Other roles at CircleCI - [Staff Software Engineer, On-Prem](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-on-prem-circleci-canada-or-9qstax84p5w7) — Canada OR, United States - [Recruiter, GTM](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiter-gtm-circleci-united-states-p5bw36jfzymk) — United States - [Agentic Operator, Growth Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/agentic-operator-growth-marketing-circleci-united-states-g70g1bkhgww8) — United States - [Staff Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-circleci-canada-united-states-united-kingdom-mexico-city-eemg47j3d784) — Canada United States United Kingdom Mexico City, Mexico - [Director, Demand Generation](https://feeny.ai/job/director-demand-generation-circleci-san-francisco-smfqftwta9q0) — San Francisco, CA - [Strategic Client Account Executive, APAC](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-client-account-executive-apac-circleci-tokyo-abrecqhndnzt) — Tokyo, Japan - [Lead Accountant](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-accountant-circleci-san-francisco-pt3eg8pgnzrd) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior GTM Strategy & Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-gtm-strategy-operations-manager-circleci-san-francisco-snrj9qf533hs) — San Francisco, CA - [Strategic Sales Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-sales-manager-circleci-san-francisco-9kp9v1bxv0sb) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-circleci-canada-united-states-united-kingdom-mexico-c7sxvxgjq1sd) — Canada United States United Kingdom Mexico City, Mexico