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 businesss creative ideas into a reality. Read this article to see why Clay is an amazing place to work and explore our wall of love to learn more about the product.

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, youll 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 Youll 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 Youll 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

Life @ Clay

Based out of a central office on 19th Street in Manhattans 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 (including 80-100% therapy coverage)
Visa sponsorship: We get it - its an arduous process, but were 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

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