Lead Software Engineer (API/Agentic)

Cricut® empowers people to make and personalize almost anything—from custom cards and apparel to everyday items and home décor. Our smart cutting machines, design apps, and materials make creativity easy and accessible for everyone. We believe everyone is born creative, and our mission is to put the power of handmade into the hands of all. With a passionate community of Makers around the world, Cricut helps turn inspiration into real, tangible creations—one project at a time.

Let’s make.

Soft Skills

- Communicates clearly in writing and in person with engineering, product and design.
- Works well with Product Management, UX and client teams, and builds agreement on scope and tradeoffs.
- Shares knowledge readily and helps other engineers on the team grow.
- Stays curious about new tools and techniques, especially in AI-assisted development, and brings practical improvements to the team.

Responsibilities

Spend most of your time writing, reviewing and shipping production backend code.; Use agentic coding tools as a core part of your daily workflow, including AI-assisted code review, automated test generation and AI-augmented development, while keeping code quality, security and human oversight in place.; Design and build APIs and services end to end, from technical approach and API contract through implementation, testing and release.; Contribute to backend architecture across our C#/.NET and Python services, keeping them modular, maintainable and testable.; Define clear, versioned API contracts that client teams on iOS, Android and desktop can consume easily.; Work closely with Product Management, UX and client engineers to take defined features from spec to shipped, raising technical tradeoffs and feasibility early.; Optimize service performance and scalability, including latency, throughput, database query efficiency, caching, concurrency and cloud cost.; Write and maintain automated unit, integration and contract tests for your services.; Drive CI/CD automation, release quality and deployment processes for containerized cloud services.; Ship behind feature flags with progressive rollout and kill switches, and validate new behavior with production telemetry before ramping up.; Own service health through observability, tracking SLOs, error rates, latency budgets and defect trends, and take part in on-call and incident response.; Take part in code reviews and share knowledge with other engineers.; Evaluate new backend, cloud, AI and tooling technologies, and recommend adopting them where they would meaningfully improve the team's work.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.; 8+ years of professional backend software development experience, with deep, production-level expertise in either C#/.NET (ASP.NET Core) or Python (FastAPI/Django).; Proven experience designing and running backend architectures at scale: microservices or modular monoliths, event-driven and asynchronous messaging (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS, Azure Service Bus), and distributed systems patterns.; Strong API design skills using REST, including versioning, pagination, idempotency, error handling and OpenAPI documentation.; Strong experience with relational and NoSQL data stores (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis), including schema design, indexing and query tuning.; Strong understanding of the concurrency model in your primary language (async/await and the Task Parallel Library in .NET, or asyncio in Python).; Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP), containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent).; At least one year of hands-on, practical use of modern AI engineering tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.), with experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into backend services where relevant (agentic patterns, evals, and latency/cost/reliability tradeoffs).; Experience with architectural patterns such as Clean Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, CQRS or hexagonal architecture.; Strong debugging, profiling and performance optimization skills with tools such as dotTrace/PerfView, py-spy/cProfile and APM tracing.; Experience with automated testing (unit, integration, contract, load) and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins).; Experience instrumenting services with observability tools (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana).; Bonus: experience with both C# and Python.; Bonus: experience working with client engineering teams (iOS, Android, Electron/Angular) to design APIs that fit mobile and desktop needs.