Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, Payments

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

We’re looking for a seasoned full-stack engineer to join Circle’s Payments team and help expand the monetization engine that powers thousands of community-based businesses. You’ll work across both infrastructure and product surfaces — from integrating payment providers and scaling checkout flows, to building high-converting paywalls, upsells, and subscription tools.

A core focus of this role is building and evolving Circle’s billing and invoicing engine, including managing subscription plans, schedules, invoicing, proration, and billing workflows. We’re looking for someone who has lived through building or operating these systems and understands their technical and business complexity.

This is a hands-on role with broad scope. You’ll own features end-to-end: system design, implementation across the stack, payment gateway integrations, and close collaboration with product and design to ship reliable, polished experiences.

If you’re excited about scaling critical systems, crafting seamless checkout and monetization flows, and empowering creators to grow globally, this role is for you.

What you'll be doing

• Work autonomously across our Ruby on Rails backend and React front-end to ship high-quality features quickly and safely.
• Lead complex projects end-to-end, driving architectural and product decisions.
• Design and scale our subscription billing and invoicing platform, including multiple pricing structures, plan changes, proration, invoicing, and full subscription lifecycle events.
• Anticipate and design for common billing edge cases such as partial periods, legacy pricing, tax/VAT integration, and failed payments.
• Build and evolve monetization features like paywalls, upsells, affiliate tools, and subscription settings.
• Integrate and scale payment solutions (e.g. Stripe, PayPal, in-app payments) to support global audiences, multiple currencies, and diverse business models.
• Optimize checkout and paywall experiences for reliability, conversion, and UX.
• Collaborate with leadership, product, and design from early exploration through launch.
• Continuously improve performance, developer experience, and code quality.
• Balance iteration speed with technical and UX excellence, shipping behind feature flags when needed.

What you'll need to be successful

• Strong alignment with our values (see our careers page).
• Proficiency in English (spoken, written, and reading) at CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5.
• 5+ years of experience building and maintaining complex full-stack web applications.
• Advanced proficiency in Ruby on Rails, MySQL/PostgreSQL, React, TypeScript, CSS/SCSS, and TailwindCSS.
• Direct experience building, scaling, or operating a subscription billing and invoicing system in production.
• Hands-on experience integrating and maintaining payments in live environments.
• Strong product mindset with a focus on user outcomes.
• Senior-level ownership mindset with the ability to lead engineering-heavy, high-impact initiatives with significant autonomy.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, remote-first environment.
• Experience working on a fully distributed team.

Bonus points

• Experience with advanced Stripe features (Connected Accounts, Subscriptions, Invoicing, Subscription Schedules).
• Experience with billing and invoicing platforms such as Outseta, Maxio, or Metronome.
• Background working with community platforms, creator tools, or other user-first SaaS products.
• Track record of building polished, detail-or