Staff Software Engineer

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?

• 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)

• 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.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a key role in driving impact across the engineering organization. You’ll leverage your technical expertise to shape strategic direction, execute ambitious and complex projects, and elevate the overall effectiveness of the team. Your impact will go beyond individual contributions — you’ll shape architecture, mentor engineers, and drive process improvements to enhance efficiency, scalability, and the overall effectiveness of the engineering organization. There’ll be no shortage of fun problems to explore and technical challenges to solve.

• Big picture thinking. You’ll take a step back and see beyond the immediate details, the current roadmap, and the individual teams. You’ll set technical strategy for the domains that you cover.

• Executing. The projects you take on may be messier, more ambiguous, or more technically complex. You can bust through obstacles that block others, but you’ll also often have to rely on larger groups of people and/or the trust and influence you have within the organization to succeed and scale your impact.

• Leveling up the team. You’ll influence engineers at the company via teaching, mentoring, reviewing designs and proposals, and reviewing code. You’ll also serve as a role model for the team around ownership, technical designs & implementation, and participation in the company culture.

• You have 7+ years of overall software development experience. You’ve worked at startups and scale-ups, and are comfortable building for a continually growing level of scale.

• You have experience in infrastructure. You’re comfortable spinning up new cloud resources, from microservices to queues, caches, and DB clusters, you’re familiar with best practices when it comes to assembling the components of your system designs.

• You have experience with observability tooling. You’ve used logging, profilers, distributed tracing, etc. to track down tricky bugs or performance issues in production systems.

• You have strong product intuition. You have to ability think broadly and cross-functionally around how your technical decisions will impact the end-user product experience both in terms of how existing features work as well as what new functionality could be unlocked.

• You are an empathetic communicator. You express nuanced ideas clearly at different levels of abstraction for different audiences. In disagreements, you prioritize curiosity over confrontation, making sure everyone feels heard and understood. You avoid tying your ego to the systems you’ve built or are trying to build.

• You’re familiar with our current tech stack or can learn unfamiliar technologies quickly. Our current tech stack is:

  • Typescript, React, Node.js, Python

  • AWS services: Aurora (Postgres), Elasticache (Redis), Docker + Elastic Container Registry (ECR), ECS (Fargate), Lambda, OpenSearch

  • IaC: Terraform

  • Deployment tools: Github, CircleCI, Netlify, Playwright

  • Observability tools: Cloudwatch, Datadog, Mezmo, Grafana