Software Engineer (Prior Staff / Principal Experience)

While we don’t have titles at Clay (everyone here is a “Software Engineer,” sorry!), we’re always looking for technical leaders who can play a key role in driving business outcomes and 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.

We’re hiring across many skillsets (product engineering, platform engineering, AI engineering, security, devEx, etc), but broadly the expectations for engineers of this seniority are:

• 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 the 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've had an outsized impact in previous roles. This can mean a lot of things—creating leverage for an entire EPD organization, building foundational systems that scale for years, launching new products or businesses that generate meaningful revenue, or bringing deep frontend and UX expertise to create exceptional product experiences—but your influence has been broad and your impact deep.
• You’ve worked at startups and scale-ups, and are comfortable building for a continually growing level of scale.
• You have excellent product intuition. You have the ability to 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

• Our community http://community.clay.com includes 17,000+ customers, 200+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs https://luma.com/claylive, and 30k members on Slack.
• Our culture https://nextplayso.substack.com/p/spotlight-clay is 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 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 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61477f2c24a826836f969afe/685d83a71452245cc1129791_4d770abfd83e276ec15315a2e06945bd_Clay2025_OperatingPrinciples.pdf.
• Read about us in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.html, Forbes http://google.com/search?q=forbes+clay&rlz=1C5OZZY_enUS1155US1155&oq=forbes+clay&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBBzkzM2owajSoAgOwAgHxBVAe8UAxJx_p&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8, First Round Review https://review.firstround.com/podcast/inside-clays-unconventional-path-to-1-25b/, and more https://www.clay.com/press.

Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Clay-EI_IE9850794.11,15.htm page!

AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history. Clay's mission is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential.

Clay predicts the next best action for your business and then helps you take it. We started by aggregating the best data for B2B companies. Then, we built the infrastructure to run any personalized campaign on top of it, including emails, ads, landing pages, and workflows that make reps more productive. Now, we're building agents that can help grow your company for you. We're already helping thousands of customers — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Visa — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.

In 2026, we raised a $115M Series D https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2026%2F09%2F09%2Fbusiness%2Fdealbook%2Fclay-ai-fundraising.html%3Fsmid%3Durl-share%26unlocked_article_code%3D1._1A.E5rN.MeYsbgEsUKbB&urlhash=XS4q&mt=4bpSf4a8omAKuAHqAqZx6C11QpbLK_QwIhSV7gSf4Wf9aywPF_KBSiX9IkWE1AhXBEjPH8mK6fAEN7CMFlpvo0lPAtKRjs-dhgzYqHiVKUMCRtw0jScFgxWCRRfYs4HCX0YL9L6PCQz-edBLinvRdU_TaVUL2dA3&isSdui=true&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BoQmIsufoRJm7X2HC5Rqd%2Fw%3D%3D at $7.1B Valuation led by Wellington — and are on track to cross $200M in revenue this quarter.

We also launched a $1M Scholarship fund for GTME Education.