Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure & Platform)

Our mission is to help organizations turn any growth idea into reality.

We see growth as a creative practice not a formula. Finding and reaching your best-fit customers takes unique ideas and constant iteration. As AI makes execution faster and tactics easier to copy creativity is the only lasting advantage. Were already helping thousands of customers including Anthropic Notion Google and Ramp go to market with unique data signals and AI research.

In 2025 we raised a $100M Series C backed by world-class investors including Sequoia CapitalG and First Round and crossed $100M in revenue.

In 2026 we announced our second employee tender offer in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round for our customers agency partners and club members.

Some things to know about us:

• Our community includes 11000 customers 150 integration partners 125 agencies 50 Clay clubs and 30k members on Slack.

• Our culture is unique inside and outside of work. Our team members are also DJs activists writers clowns marathoners skydivers psychedelic therapists social workers and more.

• All employees can work for free with world-class coaches who specialize in creativity management and more.

• Our operating principles including negative maintenance and non-attached action guide our work. Read more about them here.

• Read about us in the NYT Forbes First Round Review and more.

Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor page!

As a Software Engineer on one of our Infrastructure or Platform teams youll work on the systems every Clay product depends on: how work gets executed and scheduled at scale how services hold up under concurrency how data is stored and served with predictable latency and how the shared foundations are built so that product teams extend them rather than route around them.

This is a role with real latitude the Platform work at Clay is not a back-office function. Whether a product team can ship next quarter usually comes down to whether the foundation supports it and youll be one of the people deciding what that foundation looks like.

• Scale reliability and performance. Attack DB contention memory pressure throughput ceilings and the bottlenecks that surface as concurrency climbs. Set performance and reliability targets that hold as load grows an order of magnitude.

• Build platforms other engineers build on. Define the primitives contracts and extension points that let product teams ship on shared infrastructure instead of forking it. Then migrate the existing consumers onto it.

• Own execution and orchestration. Evolve how work is defined scheduled retried and observed across the product without breaking whats already running on it.

• Make the system legible. Give customers and engineers the instrumentation to see what a run did where it went wrong and why at a scale where nobody can trace it by hand.

• Handle the seams. The hardest problems usually live where two systems meet: input mapping between products integrations data access credit and usage accounting. These are foundational to our core UX not edge cases.

• Raise the bar around you. Set technical direction other teams inherit and pull engineering standards up through design reviews code review and the systems you leave behind.

• Product teams ship on shared infrastructure without needing a platform engineer to hold their hand.

• The system stays predictable as load grows 10x and cost per unit of work goes down rather than up.

• Large complex long-running jobs are boring: they complete and when they dont the reason is obvious.

• We can change how a core system works without breaking the products built on it.

• Scale and reliability decisions are made against measured evidence before customers find the limit for us.

• You have a proven track record of execution with 8 years of hands-on engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.

• You spike hard on at least one of:

  • Scale reliability and performance where youve fixed DB contention memory blowups and throughput ceilings on systems under real load; or

  • Platform and frameworks where youve built internal-facing platforms that engineers across a company built products on.

• You think about platforms as products. You know who your consumers are you design for their success and you treat a confusing abstraction as a bug.

• You love being a product manager as well as an engineer. Our engineers drive and own their areas end to end including the judgment calls about whats worth building.

• You are an empathetic communicator. You express nuanced ideas clearly at different levels of abstraction for different disagreements you prioritize curiosity over confrontation making sure everyone feels heard and understood.

• You love to collaborate with others to ship high quality thoughtful features. You care about craft and translate the solution into bug free easily understandable code and raise the engineering bar for those around you.

• Having a diversity of perspectives is important to you. You believe that having people with different backgrounds and perspectives creates a better team and a more holistic product.

• Youre comfortable reasoning about distributed systems concurrency queuing backpressure and failure recovery and about the data models underneath them.

• Youre familiar with our current tech stack or can learn unfamiliar technologies quickly. Our current tech stack is:

• React Typescript Python

• AWS services: Aurora (Postgres) Elasticache (Redis) Elastic Container Registry (ECR) ECS (Fargate) Lambda OpenSearch

• IaC: Terraform

• Deployment tools: CircleCI Netlify Playwright

• Observability tools: Cloudwatch Datadog Mezmo

• Experience with workflow engines orchestration systems or durable execution frameworks.

• Experience taking a system from internal tool to company-wide platform including migrating existing consumers onto it.

• Experience with multi-tenant systems where one customers workload cant degrade anothers.

• Experience running LLM calls or agent loops inside a production execution path where cost and latency both matter.

• Experience with data-intensive systems: search infrastructure large result sets or high-volume ingestion.

This isnt a pure SRE or DevOps role and it isnt a feature-only product role. Youll own whether the systems underneath Clay are correct fast and extensible enough that customers and other engineering teams can depend on them.

Were a cross-site engineering org split between NYC and SF working in two-week sprints with async planning in Slack weekly cross-functional team meetings and Linear as the source of truth for everything were building.

Required Experience:

IC