Software Engineer, Backend (Product)
About The Position
Clay is seeking a backend product engineer to take ownership of the systems that power their customer-facing features. In this role, the backend is considered the product itself, with enrichment, signals, and workflows being key areas where engineering and product decisions converge. The engineer will be responsible for a product surface from conception to deployment, collaborating with design and go-to-market partners, ensuring rapid delivery, monitoring customer usage, and continuously improving performance, reliability, and capabilities. This position requires a blend of product management and engineering skills, offering numerous challenging problems and technical hurdles to overcome.
Requirements
- A proven track record of execution.
- 4+ years of hands-on engineering experience building products people actually use.
- Desire to be a product manager as well as an engineer.
- Strong backend fundamentals, including API and schema design, SQL (preferably Postgres), and query optimization.
- The instinct to anticipate system failures before they occur.
- A bias toward impact and shipping.
- Results-oriented approach.
- Sequencing toward the version that provides the most learning.
- Preference for learning from production over documentation.
- Empathetic communication skills, able to express nuanced ideas clearly to different audiences.
- Prioritizing curiosity over confrontation in disagreements.
- Ensuring all team members feel heard and understood.
- Caring about craft, translating solutions into bug-free, easily understandable code.
- Raising the engineering bar for colleagues.
- Belief in the importance of diversity of perspectives for a better team and product.
Nice To Haves
- Experience working with systems and data at scale, such as large-scale high-performance data pipelines, event ingestion systems, or larger production systems.
- Depth in Redis, Postgres, ElasticSearch, or OpenSearch.
- Advanced proficiency in optimizing serverless workloads on AWS.
- Experience building with LLMs or agents as a product surface.
- Experience with the current tech stack: React, Typescript, Python, Node.js, AWS services (Aurora, Elasticache, ECR, ECS, Lambda, OpenSearch), IaC (Terraform), deployment tools (CircleCI, Netlify, Playwright), and observability tools (Cloudwatch, Datadog, Mezmo).
Responsibilities
- Own a product surface end to end, from problem definition through shipped, measured outcome.
- Help decide what gets built, not just how.
- Scope work with design, data science, and GTM partners.
- Write specs, determine what is essential, make decisions, and defend them.
- Talk to customers directly to understand their challenges.
- Ship fast and learn from production.
- Build the systems that make features possible, including data models, APIs, and jobs.
- Ensure systems remain fast and reliable as usage increases.
- Solve real scaling problems regularly.
- Improve the performance and reliability of Clay.
- Raise the development velocity of other engineers.
- Mentor and learn from other engineers.
Benefits
- Work for free with world-class coaches specializing in creativity, management, and more.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
