Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure & Platform)

Sapphire Partners; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Clay is seeking a Software Engineer to help scale and harden our core infrastructure and product platforms. You will work on distributed systems, define reusable primitives, and own execution and orchestration to support product teams at scale.

We expect 8+ years of production engineering experience, strong FA/Platform thinking, and fluency with React, TypeScript, Python, and AWS. Collaboration across NYC/SF teams is core to our workflow.

Qualifications

• 8+ years hands-on engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• Strong background in distributed systems, concurrency, and performance tuning.
• Experience with platform-centric thinking and building reusable infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Scale, reliability, and performance targets as load grows.
• Define primitives and extension points for shared infrastructure.
• Own execution and orchestration across the product, with minimal disruption.
• Make the system legible through instrumentation and observability.
• Handle seams where systems meet, ensuring robust data access and coordination.
• Drive technical direction and raise the engineering bar across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Platform engineering

React

TypeScript

Python

Node.js

AWS services

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

CircleCI

Netlify

Playwright

Job description

About ClayOur 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 — including Anthropic, Notion, Google, and Ramp — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research. In 2025, we raised a $100M Series C backed by world-class investors including Sequoia, CapitalG, and First Round — and crossed $100M in revenue. In 2026, we announced our second employee tender offer in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round, for our customers, agency partners, and club members.

Some Things To Know About Us

• Our community includes 11,000+ customers, 150+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs, and 30k members on Slack.
• Our culture 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.
• Read about us in the NYT, Forbes, First Round Review, and more.

Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor page!

The RoleAs a Software Engineer on one of our Infrastructure or Platform teams, you\'ll work on the systems every Clay product depends on: how work gets executed and scheduled at scale, how services hold up under concurrency, how data is stored and served with predictable latency, and how the shared foundations are built so that product teams extend them rather than route around them. This is a role with real latitude, the Platform work at Clay is not a back-office function. Whether a product team can ship next quarter usually comes down to whether the foundation supports it, and you\'ll be one of the people deciding what that foundation looks like.

What You'll Work On

• Scale, reliability, and performance. Attack DB contention, memory pressure, throughput ceilings, and the bottlenecks that surface as concurrency climbs. Set performance and reliability targets that hold as load grows an order of magnitude.
• Build platforms other engineers build on. Define the primitives, contracts, and extension points that let product teams ship on shared infrastructure instead of forking it. Then migrate the existing consumers onto it.
• Own execution and orchestration. Evolve how work is defined, scheduled, retried, and observed across the product, without breaking what\'s already running on it.
• Make the system legible. Give customers and engineers the instrumentation to see what a run did, where it went wrong, and why, at a scale where nobody can trace it by hand.
• Handle the seams. The hardest problems usually live where two systems meet: input mapping between products, integrations, data access, credit and usage accounting. These are foundational to our core UX, not edge cases.
• Raise the bar around you. Set technical direction other teams inherit, and pull engineering standards up through design reviews, code review, and the systems you leave behind.

What Success Looks Like

• Product teams ship on shared infrastructure without needing a platform engineer to hold their hand.
• The system stays predictable as load grows 10x, and cost per unit of work goes down rather than up.
• Large, complex, long-running jobs are boring: they complete, and when they don\'t, the reason is obvious.
• We can change how a core system works without breaking the products built on it.
• Scale and reliability decisions are made against measured evidence, before customers find the limit for us.

What You'll Bring

• You have a proven track record of execution, with 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• You spike hard on at least one of:
• Scale, reliability, and performance, where you\'ve fixed DB contention, memory blowups, and throughput ceilings on systems under real load; or
• Platform and frameworks, where you\'ve built internal-facing platforms that engineers across a company 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 love being a product manager as well as an engineer. Our engineers drive and own their areas end to end, including the judgment calls about what\'s worth building.
• You are an empathetic communicator. You express nuanced ideas clearly at different levels of abstraction for different audiences. In disagreements, you prioritise curiosity over confrontation, making sure everyone feels heard and understood.
• You love to collaborate with others to ship high quality, thoughtful features. You care about craft and translate the 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.
• You're comfortable reasoning about distributed systems, concurrency, queuing, backpressure, and failure recovery, and about the data models underneath them.
• You're familiar with our current tech stack or can learn unfamiliar technologies quickly. Our current tech stack is:
• 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

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 where one customer\'s workload can\'t degrade another\'s.
• Experience running LLM calls or agent loops inside a production execution path, where cost and latency both matter.
• Experience with data-intensive systems: search infrastructure, large result sets, or high-volume ingestion.

Out of Scope

This isn\'t a pure SRE or DevOps role, and it isn\'t a feature-only product role. You\'ll own whether the systems underneath Clay are correct, fast, and extensible enough that customers and other engineering teams can depend on them.

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.