Software Engineer, Developer Experience (AI)

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 https://clayrun.notion.site/Wall-of-Love-b243f2b67607438b9fad99341e6b8d47 — including Anthropic, Notion, Google, and Ramp — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.

In 2025, we raised a $100M Series C https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.htmlbacked by world-class investors including Sequoia, CapitalG, and First Round — and crossed $100M in revenue.

In 2026, we announced our second employee tender offer https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/dealbook/clay-start-up-tender-offers.html in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round https://www.clay.com/blog/community-equity-offering, for our customers, agency partners, and club members.

Some things to know about us:

• Our community http://community.clay.com includes 11,000+ customers, 150+ 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 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 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!

THE Role

Clay’s engineering team and codebase are growing quickly, and require continued investment in tooling and infrastructure to operate effectively.

In particular, as coding agents continue to advance, the hardest challenges in engineering aren't writing the code itself—they're everything around it: context, environment, validation, testing, and safely integrating changes into real production systems.

At Clay, we believe the next evolution of software engineering will come from building systems where coding agents can operate with deep awareness of the codebase, infrastructure, and development lifecycle.

That requires a major investment in developer experience and engineering infrastructure.

We’re expanding our infrastructure team to build the systems that make this possible — environments where agents can understand the full context of a codebase, execute development tasks end-to-end, and safely integrate their work into production.

While coding agents will be an important area to focus on, this role spans developer tooling, infrastructure, and agent execution systems, and the systems you build will shape how software gets built at Clay.

What You’ll Work ON

• You’ll help design and build the developer experience that powers the next generation of software engineering at Clay.

• This includes systems that make both engineers and coding agents dramatically more effective across the full development lifecycle.

• Areas you might work on include:

• Monorepo organization, orchestration, and tooling

• CI/CD pipelines, including evaluation and validation of agent-generated changes

• Cloud dev environment exploration

• Expose rich codebase context to coding agents, enabling multiple agents running and parallel and supporting automated refactors, migrations, and bug fixing

• Setup metrics and dashboards, organize forums - and any other venue to keep a pulse on how the engineering team is doing and how they can further be assisted

• Our goal is to build the infrastructure harness that allows Clay to fully leverage the latest AI Advancements.

• WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• Success in this role means:

• Clay engineers can move faster with less friction

• Coding agents can operate with deep context and make meaningful changes safely

• Our development environment adapts quickly as new AI capabilities emerge

• Engineering productivity compounds as more of the software lifecycle becomes automated

• Developing a relationship with the engineering team and creating a collaborative environment to resolve friction points

What We’re Looking FOR

• We’re looking for strong engineers who enjoy building systems that improve how software gets built.

You might be a good fit if you

• Have experience building developer tooling, infrastructure, or internal platforms

• Care deeply about developer experience and engineering productivity, including removing obstacles to productivity

• Enjoy designing systems that automate complex workflows

• Are excited about how AI will transform the software development lifecycle

• Write clean, maintainable code and enjoy owning systems end-to-end

You don’t need prior experience building AI systems — curiosity and experimentation matter more.

WHY THIS ROLE IS UNIQUE

Software engineering is changing quickly.

AI models can generate code, but making that code useful in real production environments requires deep integration with developer workflows, infrastructure, and codebase context.

At Clay, we’re investing heavily in building the systems that make that possible.

You’ll be working on infrastructure that sits at the center of how software gets built, and helping define how engineering evolves in the age of AI.