Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure & Platform)

About the role

As a Software Engineer on one of our Infrastructure or Platform teams, you’ll work on the systems every Clay product depends on: how work gets executed and scheduled at scale, how services hold up under concurrency, how data is stored and served with predictable latency, and how the shared foundations are built so that product teams extend them rather than route around them.

This role offers real latitude; platform work at Clay is not a back‑office function and directly impacts product teams’ ability to ship.

Key responsibilities

• Address scale, reliability, and performance bottlenecks such as DB contention, memory pressure, and throughput ceilings, and set targets that hold as we grow.
• Define primitives, contracts, and extension points that let product teams ship on shared infrastructure.
• Evolve execution and orchestration by improving how work is defined, scheduled, retried, and observed across the product.
• Build observability tooling that gives customers and engineers clear insight into run outcomes and failures.
• Set technical direction and raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and the systems you leave behind.

Required profile

• 8+ years of hands‑on experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in at least one area: scale/reliability/performance or building internal platforms used by other engineers.
• Ability to treat platforms as products, understand their consumers, and design for their success.
• Strong reasoning about distributed systems, concurrency, queuing, backpressure, failure recovery, and underlying data models.
• Excellent written communication; design docs and RFCs that clearly articulate trade‑offs.

Required skills

• Python
• Node.js
• React
• TypeScript
• AWS (Aurora/Postgres, Elasticache/Redis, ECR, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, OpenSearch)
• Terraform
• CircleCI
• Netlify
• Playwright
• CloudWatch
• Datadog
• Mezmo
• ClickHouse
• Dagster