Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure & Platform)

The posting, as Clay Labs wrote it

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!

THE ROLE

As a Software Engineer on one of our Infrastructure or Platform teams, you'll work on the systems every Clay product
[…]
change how a core system works without breaking the products built on it.

• Scale and reliability decisions are made against measured evidence.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• 8+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• You spike hard on at least one of:
• Scale, reliability, and performance — you've diagnosed and fixed DB contention, memory blowups, and throughput ceilings on systems under real load.
• Platform and frameworks — you've built internal-facing platforms that other engineers 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're comfortable reasoning about distributed systems, concurrency, queuing, backpressure, and failure recovery, and about the data models underneath them.
• You write and communicate clearly. Your design docs and RFCs make tradeoffs legible and move alignment forward.
• You're familiar with our current tech stack or can learn quickly: React, TypeScript, Python, Node.js; AWS (Aurora/Postgres, Elasticache/Redis, ECR, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, OpenSearch); Terraform; CircleCI, Netlify, Playwright; CloudWatch, Datadog, Mezmo; ClickHouse, Dagster.

NICE TO HAVES

• 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.
• Experience running LLM calls or agent loops inside a production execution path.
• Experience with data-intensive systems: search infrastructure, large result sets, or high-volume ingestion.

HOW WE WORK

We're 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 we're building.