Senior Backend Engineer

Our Mission

Clay is carefully designed to help you be more thoughtful with people.

Almost everyone intuitively understands the importance (and positive impact) of thoughtfulness towards others—in fact, you've probably benefited from someone else's thoughtfulness recently! However, it's difficult, effort intensive, and time consuming to be conscientious all the time. We wanted a more streamlined and sustainable approach for thoughtfully keeping in touch with our ever-growing network. And after searching and searching for something better, we built it ourselves.

We believe that Clay is the most stunning, powerful, and beautiful way to remember who you’ve met—and what matters to them. We're grateful that our mission has resonated with a passionate user base and prominent investors like General Catalyst and Forerunner Ventures, and we are eager to carry it forward. We'd be honored to have you join us.

Our Product

Clay is a beautiful and private home for all the people and relationships in your life.

After you link your accounts (email, calendar, LinkedIn, Twitter, iMessage, and more), Clay automatically builds a collection of everyone you know, creating a beautiful profile for each relationship. Clay populates photos, bios, education and work history, location, and social profiles automatically from available data, and keeps them updated over time.

Clay then helps you deepen your relationships by allowing you to find anyone with powerfully simple search, take notes from your latest conversation, set reminders for specific dates, see when a contact changes their LinkedIn or Twitter bio, be notified when a contact is mentioned in the news, and much more.

About the Role:

Clay is looking for a senior backend engineer to build features, design and implement APIs, and improve the performance and reliability of our systems as we scale.

We build our app using tried and tested technologies including Python, Postgres, RabbitMQ, and Redis, with our server infrastructure running on Kubernetes and other hosted & self-hosted services in Google Cloud. We believe in using the best tool for the job in hand, and don't shy away from solving hard problems! You’ll work closely with a stellar team of passionate, experienced engineers, designers and others who love building great product.

About you:

• 4+ years of experience building web applications with high-availability services and infrastructure on cloud hosted systems
• Comfortable developing in Python (or ability to learn)
• Experience architecting, deploying, and operating asynchronous work queues, high-volume storage systems, and high-throughput systems
• Experience in tradeoffs and performance optimizations for relational and non-relational databases and caches
• Experience writing understandable, testable code with a goal of maintainability over time
• Ability to work on full-stack projects collaboratively with frontend engineers and designers, with a product mindset and a preference for shipping early and iterating
• Understanding of security best practices
• Great communication skills. You should be able to explain your approach and the impact of your work to non-technical stakeholders in a way that is clear to them, and provide technical guidance and mentorship for other engineers.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience with Google Cloud
• 3+ years of experience in Python
• Bringing something new: built a cool tool? Open source contributions? We'd love to hear and learn about them.

Questions you will ask (and answer) in this role:

• Where is Clay using too many resources? Is there any technology or best practices that can be used to improve performance?
• What types of processes/systems should Clay have in place that they currently do not have in place?
• Where is Clay missing opportunities for efficiency in their backend setup?
• What tools should Clay be using that they currently are not using?
• Is Clay's current setup scalable as we onboard new users? What elements might be stress-tested, and how do we shore them up?

What you can expect to accomplish in your first 6 months:

• Build, manage, and update shared systems and services, such as databases, queues, service registry, secrets management, and more.
• Identify and deploying cybersecurity measures by performing vulnerability assessment and risk management
• Provision services with Kubernetes, and look for ways to improve our provisioning setup
• Monitor and act on service stats for backend services

What We Offer:

• Competitive compensation
• Excellent health and wellness benefits to help you stay at your best: 100% covered medical, dental, vision for you + 50% for spouse/dependents; One Medical membership; Kindbody Fertility (dependents included); Talkspace membership; Teladoc Virtual Health
• 8 week paid parental leave
• Generous paid vacation: Minimum of 20 days of paid time off to use however you like (vacation, national holidays, etc.)
• Education stipend: You’ll have a monthly budget to buy books, courses, and other resources you need to continue learning and developing
• Company sponsored 401k plan
• $500 work from home allowance to use on building out a workspace
• Best in class software/tools: Superhuman, Linear, Notion, etc.
• We’re a small, yet growing, team that moves fast and ships new products continuously, and you have a huge opportunity to shape Clay (ha!) from systems architecture to how we celebrate team wins. Our culture is defined but it’s not definitive, and we’re looking for smart, hardworking and passionate people to be culture adds at Clay. We offer team building activities on Fridays, and (when safe to travel) all-inclusive team offsites.
• You have the opportunity to work with a team of best-in-class engineers who know how to run across their stack and architect beautiful products
• We champion individual ownership, self-starters, and personal growth on and off the job. We’re a tight knit team that celebrates each other’s wins and improves one another through the losses