Software Engineer, Backend
Build and operate the infrastructure and platform systems underlying Clay’s products, focusing on scale, reliability, performance, orchestration, and shared developer foundations. The role requires 8+ years of production engineering experience and strong distributed-systems expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Improve scale, reliability, and performance by addressing database contention, memory pressure, throughput ceilings, and concurrency bottlenecks.
- Define performance and reliability targets as load increases.
- Build shared platforms, primitives, contracts, and extension points for product teams.
- Migrate existing consumers onto shared infrastructure.
- Evolve execution and orchestration systems for defining, scheduling, retrying, and observing work.
- Build instrumentation that explains what a run did, where it failed, and why.
- Solve integration problems involving input mapping, data access, credit accounting, and usage accounting.
- Set technical direction and raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and durable systems.
Requirements
- 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
- Demonstrated expertise in scale, reliability, and performance, or in building internal platforms and frameworks.
- Treat platforms as products and design for internal consumers.
- Own engineering areas end to end, including product judgment and prioritization.
- Communicate nuanced technical ideas clearly across audiences.
- Collaborate effectively to deliver high-quality, understandable, maintainable code.
- Reason about distributed systems, concurrency, queuing, backpressure, failure recovery, and underlying data models.
- Learn unfamiliar technologies quickly.
Technology Stack
- React
- TypeScript
- Python
- Node.js
- AWS Aurora (Postgres)
- Amazon ElastiCache (Redis)
- Amazon ECR
- Amazon ECS (Fargate)
- AWS Lambda
- OpenSearch
- Terraform
- CircleCI
- Netlify
- Playwright
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Datadog
- Mezmo
Nice to Have
- Experience with workflow engines, orchestration systems, or durable execution frameworks.
- Experience turning internal tools into company-wide platforms and migrating consumers.
- Experience with multi-tenant systems that isolate customer workloads.
- Experience running LLM calls or agent loops in production execution paths.
- Experience with search infrastructure, large result sets, or high-volume ingestion.
Compensation and Benefits
- Employees can work with world-class coaches specializing in creativity, management, and related areas.
- The engineering organization works across New York City and San Francisco in two-week sprints, with async planning in Slack, weekly cross-functional meetings, and Linear as the source of truth.
Skills
React, TypeScript, Python, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, AWS, Amazon Ecs, AWS Lambda, Opensearch, Terraform, CircleCI, Playwright, Datadog, Distributed Systems
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