Founding Backend Engineer - AI & Data

Clipbook • San Francisco, CA

2d • $180,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Clipbook’s mission: reinvent how leaders listen to and engage the world.
We are the vertical AI category leader for the $100 billion communications, public relations, and public affairs industries.
Since 2023, we have quietly grown into the largest AI company in this segment. We are backed by leading investors in the segment - including Mark Cuban, who co-led our seed round.
A bit more about us:
We bootstrapped to our first million in ARR and hit profitability before raising our $3.3 million seed round this year.
We’re currently growing >10% month-over-month and on track to >3x ARR this year.
We’re working with 200+ clients including the Boston Consulting Group, Weber Shandwick, the Gates Foundation, and dozens of government agencies across the country.
We will raise our Series A in early 2026.

Requirements

• 3–5+ years building and scaling production backend systems.
• You’re 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.
• Clipbook isn’t a 9–5.
• We’re a seed-stage startup (with Series A-level revenue metrics!) with a lot to build and customers relying on us.
• We care more about what you ship than when/where you work — but we do believe spending time together in-person (we’re hybrid, in the office 2–3x/week) meaningfully accelerates product velocity and team chemistry.
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD.
• We’re building systems that will one day serve Fortune 500 executives in real-time — so reliability matters.
• Familiarity with AWS/GCP, containerization (Docker/K8s), and CI/CD pipelines ensures we can deliver high uptime and iterate quickly.
• Experience architecting and optimizing data pipelines & storage systems.
• Ability to build scalable, cost-efficient data architectures and tune performance for large and variable workloads across text, media, and streaming sources.
• Strong product sense and a bias for action.
• We move fast, make decisions with incomplete information, and learn from real customer feedback — not endless internal debate.
• A future leader.
• You’ll help shape our engineering culture and can quickly grow into leadership as the company scales.

Nice To Haves

• LLM integration and MLOps — fine-tuning, embeddings/RAG pipelines, or RLHF workflows
• Data ingestion at scale — web scraping frameworks (Playwright, Puppeteer) and API integrations (REST, GraphQL, streaming endpoints)
• High-throughput backend systems — asynchronous execution, rate-limiting, distributed architectures
• Early-stage startup experience or technical founder experience is a huge plus — you know how to navigate ambiguity, wear many hats, and move from 0 → 1 quickly.

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, indexing, and querying massive, multi-modal datasets across news, social media, policy, and more.
• 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.
• Integrate AI into real-world workflows.
• Productionize LLMs and classical ML models for high-uptime applications — including prompt execution, embeddings, RAG pipelines, and more.
• Collaborate closely with users.
• Join customer calls, listen to pain points, and rapidly iterate to deliver solutions that genuinely move the needle for comms/public affairs teams.
• Shape Clipbook’s engineering culture.
• As an early engineer, you’ll influence everything — code quality, system design principles, documentation standards, and how we build as a team.

Benefits

• Compensation: $180K+, high-upside equity (from a team that understands commercial rigor and bootstrapping to 7-figures: pre-seed dilution but with Series A metrics), and full benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k, unlimited PTO).
• Ownership: Direct influence on product and company strategy. Ship fast and drive impact.
• Growth: Opportunity to build and lead a world-class engineering team as we scale.
• Culture: High trust, low ego, rapid iteration, and a relentless focus on solving real customer problems.
• Mission: Join a team passionate about building tools that empower leaders to make sense of the world’s information chaos.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed