Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This backend engineering role is featured because it sits at the heart of a modern, usage-heavy SaaS product where customer value is tightly linked to latency, reliability, and predictable throughput. The remit spans the kinds of platform constraints that emerge once a SaaS application becomes a core workflow for many teams, making infrastructure and data-layer decisions materially visible to end users.
For SaaS engineers, performance work compounds into durable career capital. Building observability, defining meaningful service metrics, and diagnosing bottlenecks across APIs, databases, caches, and search systems are skills that translate across most subscription products. The problems referenced here also map to common SaaS scaling patterns, such as decomposing services for independent scaling and evolving Postgres and Redis usage as traffic and data volumes grow.
The role fits an engineer who prefers deep, systems-oriented investigation over feature throughput, and who enjoys influencing other teams through standards and guidance. It will suit someone comfortable moving between analysis and implementation, and who wants to specialize in production performance across a cloud-based stack without losing touch with application-level tradeoffs.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About Clay
Our mission is to help organizations turn any growth idea into reality.
We see growth as a creative practice, not a formula. Finding and reaching your best-fit customers takes unique ideas and constant iteration. As AI makes execution faster and tactics easier to copy, creativity is the only lasting advantage. We're already helping thousands of customers — including Anthropic, Notion, Google, and Ramp — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.
In 2025, we raised a $100M Series C backed by world-class investors including Sequoia, CapitalG, and First Round — and crossed $100M in revenue.
In 2026, we announced our second employee tender offer in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round, for our customers, agency partners, and club members.
Some things to know about us:
Our community includes 11,000+ customers, 150+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs, and 30k members on Slack.
Our cultureis unique inside and outside of work. Our team members are also DJs, activists, writers, clowns, marathoners, skydivers, psychedelic therapists, social workers, and more.
All employees can work for free with world-class coaches who specialize in creativity, management, and more.
Our operating principles — including negative maintenance and non-attached action — guide our work. Read more about them here.
Read about us in the NYT, Forbes, First Round Review, and more.
Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor page!
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, 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.
What You'll 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 You'll 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
