Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About Clay

Clay is a creative tool for growth. Our mission is to help businesses grow  — without huge investments in tooling or manual labor. We’re already helping over 100,000 people grow their business with Clay. From local pizza shops to enterprises like Anthropic and Notion, our tool lets you instantly translate any idea that you have for growing your company into reality. We’re looking for sharp, low-ego people to help us turn every business's creative ideas into a reality. 

Why is Clay the best place to work in New York?

• Customers love the product (100K+ users and growing)

• We’re growing a lot (6x YoY last year, and 10x YoY the two years before that)

• Incredible culture (our customers keep applying to work here)

• In-person work (beautiful office space in Flatiron)

• Well-resourced (raised a Series B expansion in January 2025 from investors like Sequoia and Meritech)

Software Engineering, Backend @ Clay

Given our rapid growth over the past couple of years, we often have to solve pressing scaling problems to accommodate the increased load. As a Software Engineer on the Performance team, you'll be responsible for identifying these problems and then developing systems that optimize the throughput and reliability of our core systems. Strong candidates here will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and laying the foundation for performance observability.

What You'll Do

• Perform comprehensive analyses of our systems to identify and address performance bottlenecks.

• Create and monitor meaningful performance metrics for various components of our services

• Advise other teams within engineering on scalable and performant feature design and implementation 

• Address critical scalability challenges such as sharding Postgres and Redis, splitting ECS tasks into multiple services to scale independently, and addressing Node event loop blockages.

What You'll Bring

• A results-oriented mindset and a bias toward impact

• Experience in API latency optimization

• Experience with SQL and related technologies, preferably Postgres

• Experience in a role with a focus on performance aspects

• Experience in query optimization and schema design for relational databases and distributed search engines

• Expertise in any of the following: Redis, Postgres, ElasticSearch, or Opensearch

Nice To Haves

• Diversity of perspectives and interests. We hope to build a team that is curious, and open-minded.

• Experience working with systems & data at scale. May be building large-scale high-performance data pipelines, event ingestion systems, or generally working with larger production systems

• Advanced proficiency in optimizing serverless workloads on AWS

• Experience with our current tech stack:

  • React, Typescript, Python

  • AWS services: Aurora (Postgres), Elasticache (Redis), Elastic Container Registry (ECR), ECS (Fargate), Lambda, OpenSearch

  • IaC: Terraform

  • Deployment tools: CircleCI, Netlify, Playwright

  • Observability tools: Cloudwatch, Datadog, Mezmo

Compensation

• $175K – $230K • Offers Equity

Life @ Clay 

Based out of a central office on 19th Street in Manhattan's Flatiron District. We love the energy of in-person collaboration while also offering the flexibility to work from home when needed.

• Competitive salary and role trajectory: Roles, responsibilities, and comp grow as we do.

• Health insurance: Fully funded, high quality health, dental & vision coverage options. Options include a health plan that covers up to 70–80% of out-of-network therapy costs after a deductible is met.

• Visa sponsorship: We get it - it's an arduous process, but we're not scared of it.

• Paid time off: We expect team members to take at least 3 weeks fully-disconnected per year, with a flexible vacation policy beyond that.

• Free food: Free meals in office every day and unlimited snacks.

• Parental leave & fertility support: IVF fertility benefits, egg freezing, and 4 months of paid parental leave.