Staff Software Engineer

LOCATION: SEATTLE STRONGLY PREFERRED, EXCEPTIONAL REMOTE CANDIDATES TO BE CONSIDERED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS

ABOUT CLARIFY

Clarify is building the AI-native CRM — a platform designed from the ground up for how modern go-to-market teams actually work. We raised $22.5M and assembled a team of ~25 people who believe the CRM category is overdue for a complete rethink: less manual data entry, smarter automation, and AI that actually understands your pipeline.

We're early and moving fast. The foundational decisions you make here will shape how the product scales.

ABOUT THE ROLE

You'll join Clarify as a Staff Software Engineer, building the foundational systems that power our AI-native CRM. You'll work directly with founders to architect critical infrastructure—from data pipelines and integration frameworks to developer tooling and system reliability. This is a role for someone who has built scalable platforms and is excited to establish best practices from the ground up with modern tooling and AI-first principles.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

As a Staff engineer, you'll flex across many of these areas over time. Where you start depends on your strengths and where Clarify needs you most, but expect your scope to evolve as the platform and team grow:

- Build core platform systems: data pipelines, integration framework, API infrastructure, and developer tooling.

- Design scalable data models and storage strategies for complex CRM workflows and AI capabilities.

- Establish observability, monitoring, and performance standards as we scale to thousands of customers.

- Create platform standards: API patterns, service design, testing frameworks, and deployment practices.

- Own critical technical decisions: infrastructure choices, architectural patterns, and technology selection.

- Partner with founders on technical strategy, balancing innovation with pragmatic execution.

YOUR BACKGROUND

- 10+ years building distributed systems and platform infrastructure.

- Deep expertise with Postgres at scale (schema design, query optimization, migrations under load), event streaming (Kafka), and queue systems (BullMQ or similar).

- Strong with TypeScript and Node.js. Comfortable in React/Next.js to collaborate across the stack, though primary work is backend.

- Experience building developer-facing surfaces: public APIs, SDKs, or developer tooling.

- Pragmatic technical decision-making: balancing technical excellence with business impact.

- Strong operational instincts: monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.

- Excellent communication—translate complex technical concepts for various audiences.

- Startup experience preferred—you've built 0-to-1 products or scaled through hypergrowth.

- Bonus: Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, LLM APIs, or vector databases.

- Bonus: Open source contributions or technical writing demonstrating expertise.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

We offer a salary range of $200,000–$250,000 depending on level and location, benchmarked against market data for startups our size, plus competitive stock options with standard 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff. Benefits include fully covered medical, dental, and vision for you (50% for dependents), a 401(k) with company match, flexible time off, and generous parental leave. We bring the full team together 2–3 times a year for offsites.

Our Seattle-based employees work from our Pioneer Square office three days a week. Outside of Seattle, we're a fully distributed team.

Clarify is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to building an inclusive team and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.