Founding Backend Engineer - AI & Data

Clipbook; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

401k plan

Job summary

Clipbook is seeking a Backend Engineer to architect and build core backend systems while designing scalable data infrastructure. You will collaborate with users and shape engineering culture in a hybrid work environment.

The ideal candidate has 3–5+ years of experience in backend systems, and a strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and APIs. The role offers a competitive salary starting at $180K along with equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years building and scaling production backend systems.
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD.
• Experience architecting and optimizing data pipelines & storage systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect & build core backend systems.
• Design scalable data infrastructure.
• Develop performant APIs and services.
• Integrate AI into real-world workflows.
• Collaborate closely with users.
• Shape Clipbook’s engineering culture.

Skills

Backend fundamentals

Cloud infrastructure

Containerization

CI/CD

Data pipelines & storage systems

Product sense

Leadership potential

Tools

Python

Node.js

PostgreSQL

AWS/GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Product and Engineering

Clipbook’s mission: reinvent how leaders listen to and engage the world.

We are the vertical AI category leader for the $100 billion communications, public relations, and public affairs industries.

Since 2023, we have quietly grown into the largest AI company in this segment. We are backed by leading investors in the segment - including Mark Cuban, who co-led our seed round.

A bit more about us:

• We bootstrapped to our first million in ARR and hit profitability before raising our $3.3 million seed round this year.

• We’re currently growing >10% month-over-month and on track to >3x ARR this year.

• We’re working with 200+ clients including the Boston Consulting Group, Weber Shandwick, the Gates Foundation, and dozens of government agencies across the country.

• We will raise our Series A in early 2026.

What You'll Do

• Architect & build core backend systems. Drive architectural decisions across our backend stack (Python, Node.js, PostgreSQL). Own features from concept → deployment → observing users rely on what you built. We’re still laying critical foundations (e.g., Postgres vs. Firestore for client-facing data needs), so we value a pragmatic, "strong opinions, weakly held" mindset — especially when decisions are expensive to unwind later.

• Design scalable data infrastructure. Build and maintain pipelines for ingesting, normalizing, indexing, and querying massive, multi-modal datasets across news, social media, policy, and more.

• Develop performant APIs and services. Create robust interfaces and internal services that power our product end-to-end, ensuring reliability, security, and a seamless experience for customers.

• Integrate AI into real-world workflows. Productionize LLMs and classical ML models for high-uptime applications — including prompt execution, embeddings, RAG pipelines, and more.

• Collaborate closely with users. Join customer calls, listen to pain points, and rapidly iterate to deliver solutions that genuinely move the needle for comms/public affairs teams.

• Shape Clipbook’s engineering culture. As an early engineer, you’ll influence everything — code quality, system design principles, documentation standards, and how we build as a team.

• We believe leaders stay hands‑on: even as we grow, everyone (including managers) continues to ship.

What We’re Looking For

• 3–5+ years building and scaling production backend systems. You’re strong across backend fundamentals (services, data models, distributed systems), with deeper expertise in one or more areas — and a desire to keep expanding your breadth over time.

• Genuine excitement to build quickly & ship fast. Clipbook isn’t a 9–5. We’re a seed‑stage startup (with Series A‑level revenue metrics!) with a lot to build and customers relying on us. We care more about what you ship than when/where you work — but we do believe spending time together in‑person (we’re hybrid, in the office 2–3x/week) meaningfully accelerates product velocity and team chemistry.

• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD. We’re building systems that will one day serve Fortune 500 executives in real time — so reliability matters. Familiarity with AWS/GCP, containerization (Docker/K8s), and CI/CD pipelines ensures we can deliver high uptime and iterate quickly.

• Experience architecting and optimizing data pipelines & storage systems. Ability to build scalable, cost‑efficient data architectures and tune performance for large and variable workloads across text, media, and streaming sources.

• Strong product sense and a bias for action. We move fast, make decisions with incomplete information, and learn from real customer feedback — not endless internal debate.

• A future leader. You’ll help shape our engineering culture and can quickly grow into leadership as the company scales.

Bonus Points

• LLM integration and MLOps — fine‑tuning, embeddings/RAG pipelines, or RLHF workflows

• Data ingestion at scale — web scraping frameworks (Playwright, Puppeteer) and API integrations (REST, GraphQL, streaming endpoints)

• High‑throughput backend systems — asynchronous execution, rate‑limiting, distributed architectures

• Early‑stage startup experience or technical founder experience is a huge plus — you know how to navigate ambiguity, wear many hats, and move from 0 → 1 quickly.

What You’ll Get

• Compensation: $180K+, high‑upside equity (from a team that understands commercial rigor and bootstrapping to 7‑figures: pre‑seed dilution but with Series A metrics), and full benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k, unlimited PTO).

• Ownership: Direct influence on product and company strategy. Ship fast and drive impact.

• Growth: Opportunity to build and lead a world‑class engineering team as we scale.

• Culture: High trust, low ego, rapid iteration, and a relentless focus on solving real customer problems.

• Mission: Join a team passionate about building tools that empower leaders to make sense of the world’s information chaos.

Why Join Us as a Backend Engineer?

• Shape the future. As one of the very first backend engineers, you’ll architect foundational services and data infrastructure that will define Clipbook’s technology for years to come.

• Direct customer impact. What you build will ship quickly and be used by 200+ customers today — with instant real‑world feedback from comms and public affairs teams who rely on Clipbook daily.

• Technical challenges. Solve the hardest problems in large‑scale data engineering, semantic search, and AI‑powered analytics across all media modalities — e.g., how do we process and index a podcast in a way that captures its meaning, not just the transcript?

• High autonomy. Minimal bureaucracy. A massive surface area to own. You’ll have a direct line to customers and founders — and the ability to drive decisions end‑to‑end.

• Career‑defining opportunity. Build a category‑defining product and company from the ground up — with outsized equity and a clear path to engineering leadership as we scale.

Full Notion JD: https://clipbookio.notion.site/Founding-Backend-Engineer-AI-Data-29e212783a388040a373ff0a5182ed32?source=copy_link