Software Engineer, (Full Stack) Product

Clay (Earth); New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Clay is seeking a Backend Software Engineer to tackle scaling challenges in core systems, ensuring high throughput and reliability. You will identify bottlenecks, implement robust performance metrics, and guide teams on scalable design across services.

Ideal candidates bring deep SQL/Postgres expertise, experience with distributed systems, and proficiency in Redis/OpenSearch. The role involves working with AWS, Terraform, and modern deployment tools in a fast-growing environment.

Qualifications

• Experience solving large-scale systems problems.
• Proficiency in SQL and Postgres.
• Ability to design efficient database schemas for relational and distributed search engines.
• Experience optimizing API latency and throughput.
• Familiarity with caching and distributed data stores.

Responsibilities

• Analyze systems to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize throughput.
• Create and monitor meaningful performance metrics across services.
• Advise engineering teams on scalable and performant feature design.
• Address scalability challenges such as sharding Postgres and Redis, and decomposing ECS tasks into independent services.

Skills

API latency optimization

Postgres

Distributed systems

Database schema design

Performance tuning

SQL

Caching strategies

Relational databases

Tools

Terraform

CircleCI

Netlify

Playwright

AWS

OpenSearch

Redis

Elasticsearch

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!

Software Engineering, Backend @ Clay

Given our rapid growth over the past couple of years, we often have to solve pressing scaling problems to accommodate the increased load. As a Software Engineer on the Performance team, you’ll be responsible for identifying these problems and then developing systems that optimize the throughput and reliability of our core systems. Strong candidates here will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and laying the foundation for performance observability.

What You’ll Do

• Perform comprehensive analyses of our systems to identify and address performance bottlenecks.
• Create and monitor meaningful performance metrics for various components of our services.
• Advise other teams within engineering on scalable and performant feature design and implementation.
• Address critical scalability challenges such as sharding Postgres and Redis, splitting ECS tasks into multiple services to scale independently, and addressing Node event loop blockages.

What You’ll Bring

• A results-oriented mindset and a bias toward impact.
• Experience in API latency optimization.
• Experience with SQL and related technologies, preferably Postgres.
• Experience in a role with a focus on performance aspects.
• Experience in query optimization and schema design for relational databases and distributed search engines.
• Expertise in any of the following: Redis, Postgres, ElasticSearch, or Opensearch.

Nice To Haves

Diversity of perspectives and interests. We hope to build a team that is curious, and open-minded.

Experience working with systems & data at scale. May be building large-scale high-performance data pipelines, event ingestion systems, or generally working with larger production systems.

Advanced proficiency in optimizing serverless workloads on AWS.

Experience with our current tech stack:React, Typescript, Python

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