Principal Engineer

Role: Principal or Staff Software Engineer
● Location: New York City (Hybrid 3 days/week out of our office in FiDi / WSA Building)
● Type: Full-time
● Reports To: CTO
● Team: Engineering
● Experience Level: 10+ years

About SuperCircle
Supercircle is the AI-powered operating system for recovering value from billions of unsold and post-sale products
across global retail. Brands lose $170B a year to returned, damaged, and excess inventory, and 60% of products and
clothing are burned or landfilled within a year of manufacture date. We are unlocking waste as a value generator
rather than a cost center, building a new reverse logistics economy for the world’s leading brands.
Our AI-powered platform is already the de facto partner for the enterprise market trusted by 100+ brands including
J.Crew, VF Corp, GUESS, Reformation, FIGS and Parachute, and has already orchestrated the diversion of 12M+
products from t-shirts to basketballs from landfill while returning $50M+ to our partners' P&Ls.
Supercircle is a leading venture backed company in NYC that has raised $40M+ to date from top VCs, including a $24M
Series A led by Foundry in 2025 and continuing to grow even faster as we move towards our next round.
Led by multi-time co-founders in tech, retail, fashion, and supply chain, Supercircle’s stacked team includes one of the
former founders at Gilt Groupe and operators from companies including Flexport, eBay, Equinox, Gap, The RealReal,
Afterpay, Meta and Google.
We are building the rails for an industry that has, until now, run on spreadsheets and pallets — and we're just getting
started on the $170B+ in unmanaged inventory and unrecovered value sitting on brands' balance sheets.

About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer who is a builder first and an engineer second. Someone who gets genuine
energy from turning ambiguity into working products, who has already rebuilt their entire workflow around AI, and
who asks "why is a human still doing this?" more often than they ask "how should we architect this?"
This role is **based in New York City**. Candidates must be local to the NYC metro area and able to work from our
NYC office. We are not considering remote or relocation candidates for this role.
You’ll be the anchor of our NYC engineering presence — frequently the only engineer in the office, working alongside a
collaborative team and a remote engineering team (for now). This role suits someone deeply self-directed and
communicative.
What You'll Do
● Own and ship meaningful surface area of the SuperCircle platform end-to-end — APIs, web applications,
backend services, warehouse and logistics workflows, and partner integrations

● Lead technical design for new domains: schema design, service boundaries, access patterns, and the
written-down rationale that outlives the conversation
● Grow into a technical leader for our NYC team — setting direction and eventually mentoring or leading a small
group of engineers as we scale here.
● Drive and document architectural decisions — RFCs, ADRs, and crisp PR descriptions — and bring the team
along with low ego and high conviction
● Build and evolve our AI-assisted development workflow, not just as a participant but as the person who designs
how the team uses it safely and at scale
● Mentor and sponsor mid-level and senior engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback; raise
the bar on testing, observability, and operational discipline
● Engage directly with customers, partners, and commercial conversations — translate what you learn into
better product decisions and faster iteration cycles
● Prototype aggressively when the problem is unclear; build for scale when the problem is proven

What We're Looking For
Experience & Leadership
● Typically 8+ years of experience (though we weight trajectory, scope, and ownership over raw tenure) of
professional software engineering, with at least 3 years at a staff level at a high-growth or early-stage company
● Demonstrated experience leading technical direction across a team or workstream — you have set the
standard, brought others along, and been the person others look to when the hard question has no obvious
answer
● A track record of owning systems end-to-end: design, implementation, rollout, on-call, and iteration
● Experience operating close to the product and commercial layers — you have talked to customers, shaped
roadmaps, and understood how engineering decisions affect revenue and margin
● Evidence of founder-mode ownership: you have solved problems that weren't your job description because
they needed to be solved
Builder Mentality
● Your instinct when handed an ambiguous opportunity is to prototype, not to ask for requirements
● You are comfortable with incomplete information, changing priorities, and undefined markets — you treat
these as inputs, not blockers
● You optimize for outcomes over elegance, and for learning velocity over engineering perfection — without
being reckless about it
● You know when to prototype, when to build for production, when to scale, and when to refactor — and you
make that call out loud
AI-Native Workflow (Non-Negotiable)
● You have rebuilt your development workflow around AI — not added it on top
● Daily, hands-on fluency with Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent agentic coding environments on production
codebases
● You have built internal agents, custom skills, MCP servers, or automation tooling for yourself or your team —
not as a side project, but as a core part of how you work
● You use AI across engineering, product thinking, research, testing, and documentation — not just for code
generation
● You can articulate exactly where AI helps, where it introduces risk, and how to keep human judgment on the
decisions that matter
● You think in systems and automation; your default question is "why is a human doing this?"
Engineering Fundamentals

● Deep TypeScript / Node.js expertise — you have debugged the hard cases and written the postmortem
● Production experience with GraphQL or REST APIs at scale — schema design, query performance, versioning
strategy
● Production-grade React and modern meta-framework experience (Next.js, Remix) — SSR/SSG tradeoffs,
hydration architecture
● Solid AWS or equivalent cloud fluency — serverless compute, IAM, observability, cost
● Strong NoSQL data modeling — you can design a schema for a domain you've never seen before and defend it
under questioning
Commercial & Product Instincts
● You think from the user backwards — "what is the fastest way to solve the user's problem?" before "how
should we architect this?"
● You understand revenue, margin, unit economics, and enterprise sales cycles — and you enjoy it
● You ask "how does this help us close another $500k account?" as naturally as you ask technical questions
● You can run customer discovery, design workflows, and prototype interfaces — not just build what someone
else spec'd

Nice To Have
● Experience with reverse logistics, supply chain, warehouse management, or RFID systems
● Multi-tenant SaaS, partner-scoped data, or RBAC at scale
● Past work re-platforming a system that outgrew its original architecture without stopping the train
● Shipped internal AI tooling that made your team measurably faster or safer — lead with this in your application

How You Work
● You write clearly — design docs, RFCs, and Slack threads are part of how you lead
● You have strong opinions and weak attachment — you can debate hard and align fast with no drama
● You push back on premature abstraction and scope creep, and you make that call out loud
● You feel personal responsibility for company outcomes, not just your ticket queue
● You are direct, low-ego, and focused on finding the right answer — not on being right

Why SuperCircle
We're the de facto technology and supply chain infrastructure for the post-sale economy. 100+ brands run on
our physical AI network to route returns, excess, and trade-ins to their highest-value outcome, and we've
already returned $50M+ to their P&Ls. As part of our team, you'll have the rare chance to be a market maker in
a category where market, AI, and policy tailwinds are converging at once. If you're ready to define an industry
and build with us, let's talk.
Ready to join the revolution? Apply now and help us reshape the future of fashion and circular commerce.
Email resume to [email protected] and include the position you are applying in the subject line of your
email.

COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY:
SUPERCIRCLE is committed to bringing together individuals from different backgrounds and perspectives. We strive to create an inclusive environment where
everyone is welcome, is celebrated for being themselves, and can succeed together.

SUPERCIRCLE is an Equal Opportunity Employer, providing equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals. We recruit, hire and promote into
all job levels the most qualified applicants without regard to race, color, creed, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation,
military service, caregiver status, credit history, immigration status, or any other status protected under applicable law.