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Clay

Software Engineer (Prior Staff / Principal Experience)

Clay is hiring a Software Engineer (Prior Staff / Principal Experience) for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $240k-$300k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Clay.

Level's read on this job

  • Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • Pay on this posting starts 44% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • This is listed as a remote role.
  • The posting mentions OpenAI, Anthropic and AI research among its tools and skills.
  • Clay has 60 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Lead technical initiatives and shape architecture for B2B growth tools, automation, and AI agents at Clay.

openaianthropic
ai-researchsoftware-architecturetechnical-leadershipmentorshipsystem-scalability
About Clay

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 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.

Some things to know about us:

  • Our community includes 17,000+ customers, 200+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs, and 30k members on Slack.

  • Our culture 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.

  • Read about us in the NYT, Forbes, First Round Review, and more.

Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor page!

The Role

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.

What You'll Do

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.

What You'll Bring
  • 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

How we rate this

Software Engineer (Prior Staff / Principal Experience) at Clay rates 60 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchSoftware ArchitectureTechnical LeadershipMentorshipSystem ScalabilityOpenAIAnthropic

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$240k
Typical software engineer job
$167k

This posting starts 44% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Tell me about a project where software architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where mentorship was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where system scalability was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Software Architecture, Technical Leadership, Mentorship, and System Scalability. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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