Founded in 2014, Circles is a global technology company reimagining the telco industry with its innovative SaaS platform, empowering telco operators worldwide to effortlessly launch innovative digital brands or refresh existing ones, accelerating their transformation into techcos.
Today, Circles partners with leading telco operators across multiple countries and continents, including KDDI Corporation, Etisalat Group (e&), AT&T, and Telkomsel, creating blueprints for future telco and digital experiences enjoyed by millions of consumers globally.
Besides its SaaS business, Circles operates three other distinct businesses:
- Circles.Life: A wholly-owned digital lifestyle telco brand based in Singapore, Circles.Life is powered by Circles’ SaaS platform and pioneering go-to-market strategies. It is the digital market leader in Singapore and has won numerous awards for marketing, customer service, and innovative product offerings beyond connectivity.
- Circles Aspire: A global provider of Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solutions. Its cloud-based Experience Cloud platform enables enterprises, service providers and developers to deliver and scale mobile, messaging, IoT, and connectivity services worldwide.
- Jetpac: Specializing in travel tech solutions, Jetpac provides seamless eSIM roaming for over 200 destinations and innovative travel lifestyle products, redefining connectivity for digital travelers. Jetpac was awarded Travel eSIM of the Year.
Circles is backed by renowned global investors, including Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia), Warburg Pincus, Founders Fund, and EDBI (the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), with a track record of backing industry challengers.
Job Role - Principal Architect
Location - Bangalore , India
Job Description
We are looking for a Principal Architect to provide architecture leadership for our Japan market engineering team supporting povo, KDDI's digital telecommunications platform.
As a Principal Architect, you will shape the overall technical vision and evolution of the povo platform, working horizontally across product and technology domains.
You will lead architecture for complex and strategic initiatives, connect business objectives with long-term platform direction, and ensure solutions remain scalable, resilient, maintainable, and cost-efficient.
You are expected to maintain strong engineering depth, stay close to implementation and production systems, and provide practical technical leadership from strategy through delivery.
You will also provide technical leadership across engineering teams, aligning them around shared goals, guiding execution of complex initiatives, and building a culture of ownership, collaboration, and engineering excellence.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and evolve the overall technology and architecture vision for the povo platform.
- Lead end-to-end architecture for the most complex, cross-domain, and strategic initiatives.
- Ensure individual solution designs align with the long-term platform roadmap and architecture principles.
- Act as a senior technical advisor to Engineering Leads, Architects, Product teams, and leadership.
- Drive architecture alignment across domains such as identity, subscriber management, billing, payments, promotions, provisioning, usage, plans, and SIM/eSIM.
- Own architectural engagement from early requirements and solution shaping through implementation and production readiness.
- Lead stakeholder discussions with Circles Product, Engineering, SRE, leadership, and KDDI technology stakeholders.
- Present solution options, trade-offs, risks, dependencies, and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Challenge short-term solutions that create unnecessary complexity, scalability limitations, or long-term platform risk.
- Drive platform modernization, architectural simplification, technical debt reduction, and adoption of reusable platform capabilities.
- Establish architecture patterns and standards across APIs, integration, data, messaging, resilience, security, and observability.
- Lead cross-functional engineering teams through complex initiatives, setting clear technical direction, aligning ownership, resolving dependencies, and driving delivery quality and production readiness.
- Coach and develop Architects, Engineering Leads, and senior engineers, strengthening technical judgment, ownership, collaboration, and their ability to lead independently.
- Remain hands-on through technical reviews, prototyping, troubleshooting, critical design validation, and complex production problems.
Job Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- 14+ years of software engineering experience, including significant architecture and technical leadership responsibility.
- Proven experience already working in an Architect, Principal Engineer, or equivalent architecture-focused role for large-scale production systems.
- Strong track record defining architecture and technical direction across multiple domains, teams, or major platform capabilities.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices, API architecture, asynchronous processing, messaging, and event-driven architectures.
- Strong hands-on engineering background with technologies such as Go and/or Node.js.
- Deep understanding of system design patterns including caching, rate limiting, idempotency, retries, concurrency, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation.
- Strong experience with relational and NoSQL databases, Redis, data ownership, and distributed data consistency.
- Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and AWS or equivalent cloud platforms.
- Strong knowledge of scalability, performance, reliability, security, observability, and production architecture.
- Demonstrated ability to design systems serving high-volume, mission-critical workloads.
- Strong ability to evaluate architecture trade-offs across business value, engineering complexity, delivery speed, operational risk, scalability, and cost.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, including working with senior engineering, product, business, and external partner stakeholders.
- Proven ability to lead and influence multiple engineering teams without relying on direct reporting authority, building alignment, resolving disagreements, and driving shared outcomes.
- Demonstrated experience developing technical leaders and guiding geographically distributed teams through complex delivery challenges, ambiguity, and competing priorities.
- Ability to move comfortably between platform-level strategy and detailed technical problem solving.
Good to Have
- Strong experience with telecommunications or large-scale digital telco platforms.
- Knowledge across billing, charging, subscriber management, provisioning, identity, payments, promotions, or network integrations.
- Experience defining and executing multi-year platform modernization or architecture roadmaps.
- Experience evolving complex legacy platforms while maintaining business continuity.
- Experience with platforms serving millions of customers and high-volume transactional workloads.
- Experience operating in environments with multiple internal teams and large external enterprise partners.
What’s on Offer
In this role, you can expect:
- Significant influence over the architecture and long-term evolution of the povo technology platform.
- The opportunity to shape technical strategy across multiple business and engineering domains.
- Direct involvement in large-scale, business-critical technology initiatives.
- Close collaboration with senior Circles and KDDI technology stakeholders.
- Exposure to complex distributed systems and real-world telecom scale.
- The ability to combine strategic architecture leadership with continued hands-on engineering.
- Opportunities to develop Architects and senior engineering leaders across the organization.
- High autonomy and visibility in solving some of the platform's most important technical challenges.
- Competitive compensation and continued growth along the senior technical leadership path.
Circles is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, disability or age.
Data Protection and Privacy Statement
By submitting an application for this position, you, as the applicant, or your authorised representative(s), consent to Circles’ Candidate Data Protection and Privacy Policy. You also agree to the collection, use, and/or disclosure of your personal data by us solely for recruitment purposes as specified in the Policy. You acknowledge that you have read and understood the Policy, are aware of your rights regarding your personal data, and accept the terms relating to international data transfers, where applicable. You further understand that you may withdraw consent at any time, which may affect our ability to consider your application. In instances where your personal data or application is submitted by a third party, it is understood that such third party has been duly authorised by you to disclose the relevant personal data and provide consent on your behalf, and that you have been made aware of this Policy.
To all recruitment agencies: Circles will only acknowledge resumes shared by recruitment agencies if selected in our preferred supplier partnership program.
Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Circles, employees or any other company location. Circles will not be held accountable for any fees related to unsolicited resumes not uploaded via our ATS.
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