Software Engineer, Backend (Product)

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!

Were looking for a backend product engineer to own the systems behind the parts of Clay our customers use every day. Clay is a product where the backend is the product enrichment signals workflows and agents are all surfaces where the engineering decision and the product decision are the same decision.

Youll own a surface end to end: deciding what to build with your design and GTM partners shipping it quickly watching real customers use it and then making it faster more reliable and more capable. Youll wear both a PM hat and an engineering hat. Therell be no shortage of fun problems to explore and technical challenges to solve.

• Own a product surface end to end. From problem definition through shipped measured outcome. Youll help decide what gets built not just how.

• Wear the PM hat. Scope your own work with design data science and GTM partners. Write the spec cut what doesnt matter make the call and defend it.

• Talk to customers directly. Sit in on calls read the tickets watch people work inside Clay. The best backend product decisions here come from watching someone hit the wall in real time.

• Ship fast then learn. Small teams short cycles low process. Wed rather get a real version in front of customers this month than a perfect one next quarter.

• Build the systems that make features possible. Design the data models APIs and jobs behind new product capabilities and keep them fast and reliable as usage climbs. Given our growth real scaling problems land on your desk regularly and solving them is part of shipping the product well.

• Up-level the codebase. Negative maintenance is one of our operating principles. Youll improve the performance and reliability of Clay and raise the development velocity of the engineers around you.

• Mentor and learn from other engineers. Help the team grow in the areas youre strong in and learn from teammates with different strengths.

• A proven track record of execution. 4 years of hands-on engineering experience building products people actually use.

• You want to be a product manager as well as an engineer. Our product engineers drive and own their surfaces end to end. If youd rather be handed a fully-specced ticket this isnt the role.

• Strong backend fundamentals. API and schema design SQL (preferably Postgres) query optimization and the instinct to know when something will fall over before it does.

• A bias toward impact and toward shipping. Youre results-oriented you sequence toward the version that teaches you the most and youd rather learn from production than from a doc.

• Youre 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 care about craft. You translate a 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.

• Experience working with systems and data at scale large-scale high-performance data pipelines event ingestion systems or larger production systems generally.

• Depth in any of: Redis Postgres ElasticSearch or OpenSearch.

• Advanced proficiency optimizing serverless workloads on AWS.

• Experience building with LLMs or agents as a product surface not just a tool.

• Experience with our current tech stack:

• 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

Required Experience:

IC