Staff Engineer

Role: 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 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 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 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.