Senior Software Engineer, Backend

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 believe that modern GTM teams win by finding GTM alpha—a unique competitive edge powered by data, experimentation, and automation. Clay is the platform they use to uncover hidden signals, build custom plays, and launch faster than their competitors. We’re looking for sharp, low-ego people to help teams find their GTM alpha.

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)

Read more about why people love working at Clay here and explore our wall of love to learn more about the product.

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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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

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 covered, high-quality medical, dental, and vision plans for NYC Claymates. Includes options covering 70–80% of out-of-network therapy after a deductible is met. Insurance options for remote Claymates may vary by location.

• Visa sponsorship: Visa sponsorship for US-based candidates (e.g., student to work visas). We get it - it's an arduous process, but we're not scared of it. Sponsorship for candidates outside of the US may vary.

• 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 for NYC Claymates. Support for remote Claymates may vary by location.

Learn more about Clay and what it’s like to work with us right here!