Senior Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

About Clay

Clay is a creative tool for growth. Our mission is to help businesses grow  — without huge investments in tooling or manual labor. We’re already helping over 100,000 people grow their business with Clay. From local pizza shops to enterprises like Anthropic and Notion, our tool lets you instantly translate any idea that you have for growing your company into reality.
We believe that modern GTM teams win by finding GTM alpha—a unique competitive edge powered by data, experimentation, and automation. Clay is the platform they use to uncover hidden signals, build custom plays, and launch faster than their competitors. We’re looking for sharp, low-ego people to help teams find their GTM alpha.

Why is Clay the best place to work in New York?

• Customers love the product (100K+ users and growing)

• We’re growing a lot (6x YoY last year, and 10x YoY the two years before that)

• Incredible culture (our customers keep applying to work here)

• In-person work (beautiful office space in Flatiron)

• Well-resourced (raised a Series B expansion in January 2025 from investors like Sequoia and Meritech)

Read more about why people love working at Clay here and explore our wall of love to learn more about the product.

Software Engineering @ Clay

As a Senior Search Infrastructure Engineer, you will support the search platform and solutions built on top it.

You will work with various teams on functionality powered by search, advising them on search solutions, how to properly structure their data, and how to write their queries.

This will include assessing service stability, exploring ways to increase resiliency, sizing cluster hardware and optimizing the stack.

In this role, you’ll be providing the best experience for internal and external customers. This work has extremely high impact, and will contribute directly to the success of Clay.

What You'll Do

• Support search infrastructure and functionality, enabling stable and successful search experiences for our customers.

• Automate observability and resilience. Enable all developers to troubleshoot and resolve problems relating to search.

• Take steps required to ensure we hit defined SLOs.

• Build relationships with engineers and drive the search solutions roadmap.

• Develop search expertise through knowledge sharing and an active review process.

What You'll Bring

• You have experience supporting Opensearch or Elasticsearch clusters in a production environment, including scaling and debugging cloud-based infrastructure through GCP, AWS, or Azure.

• You have intimate knowledge of search queries, scale, and limitations. You can advise and troubleshoot search issues for our different engineering teams.

• You have hands-on coding experience developing services.

• You see mentorship, knowledge transfer, and review as essential prerequisites for a healthy team.

• You keep up-to-date on search solutions.

Life @ Clay 

Based out of a central office on 19th Street in Manhattan's Flatiron District. We love the energy of in-person collaboration while also offering the flexibility to work from home when needed.

• Competitive salary and role trajectory: Roles, responsibilities, and comp grow as we do.

• Health Insurance: Fully covered, high-quality medical, dental, and vision plans for NYC Claymates. Includes options covering 70–80% of out-of-network therapy after a deductible is met. Insurance options for remote Claymates may vary by location.

• Visa sponsorship: Visa sponsorship for US-based candidates (e.g., student to work visas). We get it - it's an arduous process, but we're not scared of it. Sponsorship for candidates outside of the US may vary.

• Paid time off: We expect team members to take at least 3 weeks fully-disconnected per year, with a flexible vacation policy beyond that.

• Free food: Free meals in office every day and unlimited snacks.

• Parental leave & fertility support: IVF fertility benefits, egg freezing, and 4 months of paid parental leave for NYC Claymates. Support for remote Claymates may vary by location.

Learn more about Clay and what it’s like to work with us right here!