Staff Backend Software Engineer, Clubhouse
$260-290k
+ Meaningful ownership in the company
Social media app based on voice
Be an early applicant
Social media app based on voice
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$260-290k
+ Meaningful ownership in the company
201-500 employees
Company mission
To fill everyone's life with rich and meaningful friendships.
Role
Who you are
- Technically deep and systems-minded. You’ve led the design and implementation of complex backend systems with long-term performance, reliability, or cost implications. You can see around corners and help teams make architectural choices that stand the test of time
- A mentor and multiplier. You get energy from enabling more junior engineers to succeed. You provide thoughtful code reviews, unblock others, and model how to navigate ambiguity. You teach patterns, not just fixes
- Comfortable in ambiguity. You don’t just tolerate undefined problems - you use them as a design space. You know how to bring clarity without slowing teams down
- Cross-functional collaborator. You partner well with PMs, designers, and data scientists, ensuring technical decisions balance speed, reliability, and product impact. You communicate tradeoffs clearly and calmly
- Low ego, high impact. You raise the bar for backend engineering through thoughtful leadership and strong execution, without needing to be the loudest voice in the room
What the job involves
- We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer for our Foundations team. This is a high-leverage technical role focused on scaling the reliability, performance, and architectural maturity of our systems
- You’ll help shape how backend engineering is done at Alpha by not only by delivering critical systems, but also by mentoring others, codifying patterns, and raising the bar for technical ownership
- You’ll partner closely with founders, product, infra, and client teams to make sure our backend systems scale with product ambition, balancing speed, quality, cost efficiency and stability in a fast-moving environment
- Shape systems at scale. Lead design and implementation of backend systems across APIs, data pipelines, infra, and service boundaries, solving real technical challenges beyond feature delivery
- Enable and mentor others. Invest in the growth of more junior engineers by reviewing architecture, pairing, and teaching patterns that increase long-term team velocity
- Evolve engineering practices. Help mature service ownership, improve system design processes, and drive long-term backend quality through documentation, modeling, and systematization
- Deliver measurable outcomes. Drive projects that reduce infra costs, improve incident response, or re-architect brittle systems—ensuring backend engineering scales with product growth
Our take
Clubhouse is an invite-only audio chat social platform, catering to users who are turning away from mainstream social platforms. It makes talking, chatting, storytelling, and developing personal relationships more simple and effortless across the globe. With this approach, it is reducing the friction for human socialising in an increasingly digital world.
One big challenge for the company will be competing with larger platforms as they launch similar “social audio” features. This could make a real dent in Clubhouse’s market share, and it will also need to account for restrictions on its platform from countries such as China and the UAE.
That said, Clubhouse should at least be able to cash in on jumping on the social audio concept first. And, if it continues to roll out new features and focus on more intimate social connections, it will have a chance to carve itself a nice niche in the social media sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
45% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Jan 2021
$100m
SERIES B
May 2020
$12m
SERIES A
Total funding: $112m
Company benefits
- Flexible vacation
- Great healthcare
- Family leave benefits
- Generous work from home stipend
- Work from anywhere
- Quarterly in-person get togethers
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Paul Davison
(Co-founder & CEO)Was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, before founding Highlight, which was acquired by Pinterest. After working as a Pinterest Product Lead for a year, they co-founded Clubhouse in February 2020.
Rohan Seth
(Co-founder)After graduating from Stanford in Computer Science, Rohan worked at Google for 6 years. Also co-founded Memry Labs, which was later acquired by Opendoor, as well as Lydian Accelerator.
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