Founding Backend Engineer – AI & Data

About the role

Clipbook is building AI‑powered media monitoring and analytics tools for communications, PR, and public affairs teams. As one of the first engineers, you will shape the core backend systems that serve 200+ customers and help the company scale to eight‑figure revenue.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and build core backend services using Python, Node.js and PostgreSQL.
• Design and maintain scalable data pipelines for ingesting, normalizing, deduplicating and indexing massive multimodal datasets (text, audio, video).
• Integrate LLMs and other ML models into production workflows, including RAG pipelines, embeddings, and fine‑tuned models.
• Develop performant, secure APIs and internal services that power the end‑to‑end product.
• Collaborate directly with customers to iterate quickly on features that impact communications teams.
• Help define engineering culture, code quality standards, documentation practices and hiring processes.

Required profile

• 2–10+ years of experience building and scaling production backend systems.
• Proven ability to take systems from zero to production and own the full lifecycle.
• Comfort with ambiguity, strong ownership mindset and a bias for shipping quickly.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Potential to grow into engineering leadership as the company scales.

Required skills

• Python
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• AWS or GCP
• Docker & Kubernetes
• CI/CD pipelines
• Spark, Kafka, Flink, BigQuery
• LLMs, RAG, embeddings, fine‑tuning

What we offer

• Salary range $150K–$220K per year
• Early‑stage equity grant with significant upside
• Medical, dental, vision coverage
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Unlimited PTO
• Clear path to engineering leadership