Software Engineer, (Prior Staff / Principal Experience)

Clay; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free coaching

Job summary

Clay in San Francisco seeks a technical leader who can shape strategy, execute ambitious projects, and elevate engineering effectiveness across the organization.

You’ll mentor engineers, influence architecture, and drive process improvements to boost efficiency, scalability, and product outcomes. This role embraces ownership, collaboration, and a culture of creativity without formal titles.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams and shaping technical strategy.
• Experience at startups or scale‑ups and building for growth.
• Strong product intuition with cross‑functional thinking.
• Empathetic communicator who explains ideas clearly and fosters collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Big picture thinking to set the technical strategy across domains.
• Executing on ambitious, complex projects and scaling impact.
• Mentoring engineers, reviewing designs, and modeling ownership and culture.

Skills

Technical leadership

Strategic thinking

Mentoring

Communication

Frontend and UX

Team collaboration

Tools

Typescript

React

Node.js

Python

AWS

Terraform

Docker

OpenSearch

CircleCI

Playwright

Datadog

Grafana

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

While we don’t have titles at Clay (everyone here is a “Software Engineer,” sorry!), we’re always looking for technical leaders who can play a key role in driving business outcomes and impact across the engineering organization. You’ll leverage your technical expertise to shape strategic direction, execute ambitious and complex projects, and elevate the overall effectiveness of the team. Your impact will go beyond individual contributions: you’ll shape architecture, mentor engineers, and drive process improvements to enhance efficiency, scalability, and the overall effectiveness of the engineering organization. There’ll be no shortage of fun problems to explore and technical challenges to solve.

What You’ll Do

• Big picture thinking. You’ll take a step back and see beyond the immediate details, the current roadmap, and the individual teams. You’ll set the technical strategy for the domains that you cover.
• Executing. The projects you take on may be messier, more ambiguous, or more technically complex. You can bust through obstacles that block others, but you’ll also often have to rely on larger groups of people and/or the trust and influence you have within the organization to succeed and scale your impact.
• Leveling up the team. You’ll influence engineers at the company via teaching, mentoring, reviewing designs and proposals, and reviewing code. You’ll also serve as a role model for the team around ownership, technical designs & implementation, and participation in the company culture.

What You’ll Bring

• You've had an outsized impact in previous roles. This can mean a lot of things—creating leverage for an entire EPD organization, building foundational systems that scale for years, launching new products or businesses that generate meaningful revenue, or bringing deep frontend and UX expertise to create exceptional product experiences—but your influence has been broad and your impact deep.
• You’ve worked at startups and scale‑ups, and are comfortable building for a continually growing level of scale.
• You have excellent product intuition. You have the ability to think broadly and cross‑functionally around how your technical decisions will impact the end‑user product experience both in terms of how existing features work as well as what new functionality could be unlocked.
• You are 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 avoid tying your ego to the systems you’ve built or are trying to build.
• You’re familiar with our current tech stack or can learn unfamiliar technologies quickly. Our current tech stack is:
  • Typescript, React, Node.js, Python
  • AWS services: Aurora (Postgres), Elasticache (Redis), Docker + Elastic Container Registry (ECR), ECS (Fargate), Lambda, OpenSearch
  • IaC: Terraform
  • Deployment tools: Github, CircleCI, Netlify, Playwright
  • Observability tools: Cloudwatch, Datadog, Mezmo, Grafana

Compensation Range: $240K - $300K