Principal Engineer

Role: Principal 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: 14+ years

About SuperCircle

SuperCircle is building the infrastructure to close the loop in fashion. We’re the SaaS technology and reverse logistics operating system powering circularity for brands and retailers—capturing apparel, footwear, accessories, and home textiles from 2,200+ retail locations and routing them to their highest-value next life through AI-powered sortation across 50+ reuse and recycling streams. As the first and only textile waste management platform of our kind, we process end-of-life textiles into reuse and recycling channels, unlocking best-in-class profitability and sustainability outcomes for our partners, including Lululemon, Target, Nike, J.Crew, GUESS, Reformation, FIGS, and Parachute Home.

In late 2025, we closed a $24M Series A led by Foundry to scale our supply chain data capture, AI-driven sorting, and textile recovery infrastructure. We’re a growing, senior team building the rails for an industry that has, until now, run on spreadsheets and pallets.

Our mission is simple: to profitably divert 1B+ textiles from landfill by 2030—and we’re on track to do it.

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer who is a builder first and an engineer second. This is the most senior Engineer role at SuperCircle and will have the opportunity to build and scale the team in NYC. You will set the technical direction for the platform, shape how the company builds, and be a force multiplier for every engineer around you. You will also write production code. 

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 (Head of Product included) and a remote engineering team (for now). This role suits someone deeply self-directed and communicative.

What You'll Do

• Define the technical roadmap for the SuperCircle platform — database architecture, API design, service boundaries, AI infrastructure, and the standards the whole team builds against
• Resolve the hardest technical problems in the company: the architectural decisions that will be lived with for years, the integrations where correctness has physical consequences, the systems that need to scale before we know exactly how
• Design and lead the build of net-new platform capabilities — often before the full product requirement is clear — and shape the requirement in the process
• Own and evolve our AI-assisted development practice at the organizational level: tooling, standards, guardrails, and the internal culture around when to delegate to a sub-agent and when to drive yourself
• Mentor and sponsor engineers at all levels; close capability gaps through pairing, documentation, and structured feedback; make the team around you measurably better
• Engage directly with customers, commercial leadership, and partners — translate strategic context into technical direction and technical constraints into product decisions
• Write the design docs, RFCs, and ADRs that outlive the conversation — and lead the review process with low ego and high conviction

What We're Looking For

Experience & Leadership (Required)

• Typically 12+ years, with a track record of operating well beyond your years — we index on slope, not just time.
• A demonstrated track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams, not just within a single squad — you have written the standards others build against
• Deep experience leading through influence without authority: you have shaped how an engineering organization works without needing a management title to do it
• Experience operating as a technical peer to company leadership — you have been in the room where product, commercial, and engineering strategy converge, and you have shaped the outcome
• Verifiable history of building things from scratch in high-ambiguity environments: early-stage companies, new product lines, or platform re-architectures where there was no playbook
• A pattern of founding-adjacent ownership — you have solved problems that weren't your job because they needed solving, and you didn't wait to be asked

AI-Native at Organizational Scale (Non-Negotiable)

• You have not just adopted AI tools — you have redesigned how you and your team work around them
• You have shipped internal AI infrastructure: agents, MCP servers, custom tooling, automation pipelines — things that made your organization measurably faster or safer, not just cooler
• You use AI across the full surface area of your work: engineering, architecture review, product research, security analysis, documentation, decision-making
• You have a written point of view on AI-assisted development: where it creates leverage, where it introduces systemic risk, and how to build organizational guardrails — you can write the policy, not just follow it
• You think in systems and automation at the organizational level — your question is not "should we use AI here?" but "why hasn't this been automated yet?"
• You have used multiple models simultaneously for non-trivial production decisions and can articulate why you made those choices

Engineering Fundamentals

• Expert-level TypeScript / Node.js — you have debugged the hardest cases, written the postmortems, and designed the conventions others follow
• Architectural fluency with GraphQL or REST APIs at scale — schema evolution, versioning strategy, performance under real load
• Production-grade React and modern meta-framework expertise — SSR/SSG architecture, design-system governance, hydration at scale
• Deep AWS or equivalent cloud ownership — you make the infrastructure decisions, not just the application decisions; IAM, networking, cost modeling, and observability are in scope
• Expert NoSQL data modeling — you can design a schema for a domain you've never seen, defend it under pressure, and know when it needs to change before the rest of the team does

Commercial & Product Instincts

• You have product instincts that rival many PMs — you can run discovery, design workflows, prototype interfaces, and build production systems
• You understand revenue, margin, unit economics, and enterprise sales cycles deeply enough to have meaningfully shaped commercial outcomes
• You ask "how does this help us win the next $1M in ARR?" as naturally as you ask architectural questions
• You think from the user backwards, always — and you have the customer conversation scars to prove it

Relationship with Ambiguity

• You want problems, not requirements — when others say "the requirements aren't clear," you say "let's figure out what the requirements should be"
• You are energized by undefined markets, incomplete information, and moving targets
• Your instinct when handed an ambiguous opportunity is to prototype something in 48 hours and show it to someone

Nice To Have

• Experience with reverse logistics, supply chain, warehouse management, or RFID systems
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture, partner-scoped data, or RBAC at scale
• Past experience re-platforming a system mid-flight without stopping the train
• Experience as a founding engineer or CTO at an early-stage company

How You Work

• You write with precision and you write often — design docs, RFCs, ADRs, and Slack threads are how you lead at scale
• You have strong opinions and weak attachment — you can debate hard, align fast, and move on without ego
• You hold a high operational bar for everything you ship: alerts, runbooks, cost models, degraded-mode behavior
• You feel personal accountability for company outcomes — not just platform reliability
• You are comfortable being the most senior technical voice in the room and the person leaving the most thoughtful PR comment on a Tuesday afternoon

• You are direct, low-ego, and relentlessly focused on finding the right answer

   

Why SuperCircle

We’re not just solving for waste – we’re creating value from it. SuperCircle is trusted by leading brands and built to scale textile recovery through data, automation, and deep supply chain integration. As part of our team, you’ll gain visibility, ownership, and the chance to define how circularity becomes standard across retail. If you're ready to make an impact that spans P&L and planet, 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.