Software Engineer, Backend (Product)

Role Summary

We're 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.

You'll 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. You'll wear both a PM hat and an engineering hat. There'll be no shortage of fun problems to explore and technical challenges to solve.

Responsibilities

• Own a product surface end to end. From problem definition through shipped, measured outcome. You'll 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 doesn't 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. We'd 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. You'll 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 you're strong in, and learn from teammates with different strengths.

Requirements

• 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 you'd rather be handed a fully-specced ticket, this isn't 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. You're results-oriented, you sequence toward the version that teaches you the most, and you'd rather learn from production than from a doc.
• You're an empathetic communicator. You express nuanced ideas clearly at different levels of abstraction for different audiences. In 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.

NICE TO HAVES

• 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, Node.js
• 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

About the Company

ABOUT CLAY

AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history. Clay's mission is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential.

Clay predicts the next best action for your business and then helps you take it. We started by aggregating the best data for B2B companies. Then, we built the infrastructure to run any personalized campaign on top of it, including emails, ads, landing pages, and workflows that make reps more productive. Now, we're building agents that can help grow your company for you. We're already helping thousands of customers — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Visa — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.

In 2026, we raised a $115M Series D https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F09%2F09%2Fbusiness%2Fdealbook%2Fclay-ai-fundraising.html%3Fsmid%3Durl-share%26unlocked_article_code%3D1._1A.E5rN.MeYsbgEsUKbB&urlhash=XS4q&mt=4bpSf4a8omAKuAHqAqZx6C11QpbLK_QwIhSV7gSf4Wf9aywPF_KBSiX9IkWE1AhXBEjPH8mK6fAEN7CMFlpvo0lPAtKRjs-dhgzYqHiVKUMCRtw0jScFgxWCRRfYs4HCX0YL9L6PCQz-edBLinvRdU_TaVUL2dA3&isSdui=true&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BoQmIsufoRJm7X2HC5Rqd%2Fw%3D%3D at $7.1B Valuation led by Wellington — and are on track to cross $200M in revenue this quarter. We also launched a $1M Scholarship fund for GTME Education.

Some things to know about us

• Our community http: //community.clay.com includes 17,000+ customers, 200+ 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 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!