Founding Backend Engineer – AI & Data

Clipbook•New York City, NY

About The Position

Clipbook builds AI-powered media monitoring and analytics tools for communications, PR, and public affairs teams. We help them track, search, and make sense of coverage across text, audio, and video. We launched in 2023 and have grown to 200+ clients including BCG, Weber Shandwick, and dozens of government agencies. We bootstrapped to seven-figures in ARR before raising a $3.3M seed round (co-led by Mark Cuban). We plan to raise our Series A this year and we are aiming for eight-figures revenue by end of year. Our founding team has backgrounds at BCG, Bain, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the White House, and Congress, and has previously built startups backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Coatue, and NFX. The Role You'd be one of the first engineers at Clipbook — joining a small but mighty engineering team with engineers from Meta, Stripe, and AWS. You'll have real influence over architecture and technical direction, and what you build will ship to 200+ customers quickly.

Requirements

2–10+ years building and scaling production backend systems.
You've taken systems from zero to production and owned the full lifecycle.
Strong across backend fundamentals (services, data models, distributed systems), with deeper expertise in one or more areas — and a desire to keep expanding your breadth over time.
Genuine excitement to build quickly & ship fast.
You take ownership.
Comfortable with ambiguity.
Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD.
Familiarity with AWS/GCP, containerization (Docker/K8s), and CI/CD pipelines ensures we can deliver high uptime and iterate quickly.
A future leader.
Data Engineering: Spark, Kafka, Flink, BigQuery, streaming pipelines, ETL at scale.
Distributed Systems: High-volume scaling, fault tolerance, eventual consistency.
AI/ML: LLMs in production, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, inference optimization.
Backend: Python, Node.js, PostgreSQL, high-concurrency systems.

Nice To Haves

Computer vision or multimodal model experience (audio, video, image).
Semantic search, vector databases, or meaning-aware retrieval.
LLM fine-tuning, RLHF, or eval pipelines.
Web scraping and API integrations at scale.
Startup founder or early-stage experience is a huge plus.

Responsibilities

Architect & build core backend systems.
Drive architectural decisions across our backend stack (Python, Node.js, PostgreSQL).
Own features from concept → deployment → observing users rely on what you built.
Design scalable data infrastructure.
Build and maintain pipelines for ingesting, normalizing, deduplicating, indexing, and querying massive, multi-modal datasets (text, audio, video) across news, social media, policy, and more.
Integrate AI into real-world workflows.
Put LLMs and ML models into production for real workflows: RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt execution, agentic systems, fine-tuned models.
Design systems that scale.
Build systems that will hold up as we grow 10x, while being practical about what to invest in now vs. what can wait.
Develop performant APIs and services.
Create robust interfaces and internal services that power our product end-to-end, ensuring reliability, security, and a seamless experience for customers.
Collaborate closely with users.
Join customer calls, hear what's working and what isn't, and build in response.
Rapidly iterate to deliver solutions that genuinely move the needle for comms/public affairs teams.
Shape Clipbook's engineering culture.
As one of the first engineers, you'll influence everything — code quality, system design principles, documentation standards, and how we build as a team.
We believe leaders stay hands-on: even as we grow, everyone (including managers) continues to ship.