Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure & Platform)

The role

You will work on the systems every Clay product depends on, including execution, scheduling, and data storage. You will address scale, reliability, and performance while building platforms for other engineers to use.

What you will do

• Address DB contention, memory pressure, throughput ceilings, and other bottlenecks
• Set performance and reliability targets
• Define primitives, contracts, and extension points for product teams
• Evolve how work is defined, scheduled, retried, and observed
• Provide instrumentation for customers and engineers
• Set technical direction through design reviews and code review

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production systems at scale
• Experience in at least one of: scale, reliability, and performance; platform and frameworks; or thinking about platforms as products
• Comfortable reasoning about distributed systems, concurrency, queuing, backpressure, and failure recovery
• Ability to write and communicate clearly via design docs and RFCs
• Familiarity with React, TypeScript, Python, Node.js, AWS, Terraform, CircleCI, Netlify, Playwright, CloudWatch, Datadog, Mezmo, ClickHouse, or Dagster

Nice to have

• Experience with workflow engines, orchestration systems, or durable execution frameworks
• Experience taking a system from internal tool to company-wide platform
• Experience with multi-tenant systems
• Experience running LLM calls or agent loops inside a production execution path
• Experience with data-intensive systems

Benefits

• All employees can work with world-class coaches who specialize in creativity, management, and more

About the company

Clay is an AI company that builds infrastructure to help businesses grow. They provide data, signals, and AI research to customers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Visa.