Staff Software Engineer

Clarify•Seattle, WA

22h•Hybrid

About The Position

Clarify is building the AI-native CRM — a platform designed from the ground up for how modern go-to-market teams actually work. We raised $22.5M and assembled a team of ~25 people who believe the CRM category is overdue for a complete rethink: less manual data entry, smarter automation, and AI that actually understands your pipeline. We're early and moving fast. The foundational decisions you make here will shape how the product scales. You'll join Clarify as a Staff Software Engineer, building the foundational systems that power our AI-native CRM. You'll work directly with founders to architect critical infrastructure—from data pipelines and integration frameworks to developer tooling and system reliability. This is a role for someone who has built scalable platforms and is excited to establish best practices from the ground up with modern tooling and AI-first principles.

Requirements

10+ years building distributed systems and platform infrastructure.
Deep expertise with Postgres at scale (schema design, query optimization, migrations under load), event streaming (Kafka), and queue systems (BullMQ or similar).
Strong with TypeScript and Node.js.
Comfortable in React/Next.js to collaborate across the stack, though primary work is backend.
Experience building developer-facing surfaces: public APIs, SDKs, or developer tooling.
Pragmatic technical decision-making: balancing technical excellence with business impact.
Strong operational instincts: monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.
Excellent communication—translate complex technical concepts for various audiences.

Nice To Haves

Startup experience preferred—you've built 0-to-1 products or scaled through hypergrowth.
Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, LLM APIs, or vector databases.
Open source contributions or technical writing demonstrating expertise.

Responsibilities

Build core platform systems: data pipelines, integration framework, API infrastructure, and developer tooling.
Design scalable data models and storage strategies for complex CRM workflows and AI capabilities.
Establish observability, monitoring, and performance standards as we scale to thousands of customers.
Create platform standards: API patterns, service design, testing frameworks, and deployment practices.
Own critical technical decisions: infrastructure choices, architectural patterns, and technology selection.
Partner with founders on technical strategy, balancing innovation with pragmatic execution.