The crypto firm hiring grads & Meta alumni despite SVB setback
Some weeks ago, Crypto unicorn Circle was looking to grow in a big way. Despite doubling its headcount in 2022 and even though other crypto titans have been entering hiring freezes, Circle said it wanted to keep growing by 15-25%. However, recent events with Silicon Valley Bank could have thrown a spanner in those works.
Circle had $3.3bn of USDC reserves in SVB. At one point, the coin's value fell 14% to just 86 cents. Since then, however, USDC has regained its $1 value and Circle can hypothetically continue hiring.
It's been hiring already. Recruits in 2023 have been a mix of experienced talent and fresh graduates. A number of experienced staff have joined from Meta, including risk manager Sagar Sudhir Behere. Senior meta engineer Joe Hu joined Circle in February, having been a "tech lead on building large-scale data lineage graphs."
Circle's graduate hires also have a fine pedigree. New York based Yifan Yang, who joined in January, interned at both hedge fund Citadel and fintech payments giant Stripe. Viktor Bálint Ladics, also New York based, interned at Mercedes-Benz before joining in February.
When it comes to very senior hires, though, Circle prefers to target rival fintechs. Senior solutions engineer Patrick Phua moved from San Francisco to Singapore, joining them in February from B2B fintech Plaid having also worked at crypto firm Ripple. In London, Ritesh Patel, formerly a product operations lead at Blockchain.com, is now Circle's EMEA lead for solutions engineering.
Circle is still hiring, with 29 open roles. Its engineering focus has switched to senior hiring, however. A principal software engineer can earn a base salary of up to $325k with a 20% bonus.
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