Software Engineer, Backend (Product)

Clay Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free coaching

Job summary

Clay Labs is seeking a backend product engineer who owns the systems behind the surfaces our customers use daily. You will shape what to build with design and GTM partners, ship quickly, observe real users, and then iterate to improve speed, reliability, and capability.

You will wear both a PM hat and an engineering hat, collaborating across teams. This role offers problems to solve, scale, and impact across Clay's growing product surface.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on engineering experience building products people actually use.
• Desire to be a product manager as well as an engineer.
• Strong backend fundamentals including API design and data modeling.
• Bias toward impact and toward shipping; prefer production learning over docs.
• Empathetic communicator with ability to tailor messaging.
• Attention to craft and high-quality code.
• Valuing diverse perspectives for better product outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own a product surface end to end from problem definition through shipped, measured outcomes.
• Wear the PM hat and the engineering hat, collaborating with design and GTM partners.
• Talk to customers directly; observe usage and feedback to guide decisions.
• Ship fast with small, iterative teams and low process.
• Build data models, APIs, and jobs behind new product capabilities and ensure scalability.
• Up-level the codebase by reducing maintenance and improving performance.
• Mentor and learn from other engineers to grow the team.

Skills

4+ years engineering experience

Product mindset

Backend fundamentals

Shipping focus

Empathetic communication

Craftsmanship

Diversity of perspectives

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

OpenSearch

AWS

Terraform

CircleCI

Netlify

Playwright

Datadog

Mezmo

Job description

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 — 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 Role:

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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What You'll Bring

• 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