Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Clay’s product sits squarely in modern SaaS infrastructure for go to market work, where reliability and response time directly shape customer trust and retention. A backend engineer focused on performance is therefore a lever on the core subscription experience, not a side project. The remit touches the kinds of scaling constraints SaaS companies face once usage grows: database pressure, cache strategy, service boundaries, and the instrumentation needed to see problems early.
For a long term SaaS engineering path, this role builds durable strengths in operating multi tenant systems under load. Work like query and schema optimization, sharding, and observability design translates across cloud native SaaS stacks, regardless of domain. It also develops the habit of partnering with product engineering teams by shaping performance aware feature design, a common inflection point as SaaS organizations mature.
This position suits engineers who prefer measurable outcomes and methodical investigation over greenfield feature churn. It fits someone who enjoys tracing latency to root causes, turning findings into metrics and guardrails, and influencing architecture through evidence. Candidates interested in databases, caching layers, and production diagnostics will find the day to day especially aligned with their craft.
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
