Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

ABOUT CLAY

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. We're already helping thousands of customers https://clayrun.notion.site/Wall-of-Love-b243f2b67607438b9fad99341e6b8d47 — including Anthropic, Notion, Google, and Ramp — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.

In 2025, we raised a $100M Series C https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.htmlbacked by world-class investors including Sequoia, CapitalG, and First Round — and crossed $100M in revenue.

In 2026, we announced our second employee tender offer https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/dealbook/clay-start-up-tender-offers.html in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round https://www.clay.com/blog/community-equity-offering, for our customers, agency partners, and club members.

Some things to know about us:

- Our community http://community.clay.com includes 11,000+ customers, 150+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs https://luma.com/claylive, and 30k members on Slack.

- Our culture https://nextplayso.substack.com/p/spotlight-clay 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 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61477f2c24a826836f969afe/685d83a71452245cc1129791_4d770abfd83e276ec15315a2e06945bd_Clay2025_OperatingPrinciples.pdf.

- Read about us in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.html, Forbes http://google.com/search?q=forbes+clay&rlz=1C5OZZY_enUS1155US1155&oq=forbes+clay&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBBzkzM2owajSoAgOwAgHxBVAe8UAxJx_p&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8, First Round Review https://review.firstround.com/podcast/inside-clays-unconventional-path-to-1-25b/, and more https://www.clay.com/press.

Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Clay-EI_IE9850794.11,15.htm page!

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, BACKEND @ CLAY

Given our rapid growth over the past couple of years, we often have to solve pressing scaling problems to accommodate the increased load. As a Software Engineer on the Performance team, you'll be responsible for identifying these problems and then developing systems that optimize the throughput and reliability of our core systems. Strong candidates here will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and laying the foundation for performance observability.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Perform comprehensive analyses of our systems to identify and address performance bottlenecks.

- Create and monitor meaningful performance metrics for various components of our services

- Advise other teams within engineering on scalable and performant feature design and implementation

- Address critical scalability challenges such as sharding Postgres and Redis, splitting ECS tasks into multiple services to scale independently, and addressing Node event loop blockages.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- A results-oriented mindset and a bias toward impact

- Experience in API latency optimization

- Experience with SQL and related technologies, preferably Postgres

- Experience in a role with a focus on performance aspects

- Experience in query optimization and schema design for relational databases and distributed search engines

- Expertise in any of the following: Redis, Postgres, ElasticSearch, or Opensearch

NICE TO HAVES

- Diversity of perspectives and interests. We hope to build a team that is curious, and open-minded.

- Experience working with systems & data at scale. May be building large-scale high-performance data pipelines, event ingestion systems, or generally working with larger production systems

- Advanced proficiency in optimizing serverless workloads on AWS

- 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