Backend Engineer, Clerk
+ Stock option plan
Authentication and user management
Job no longer available
Authentication and user management
201-500 employees
Job no longer available
+ Stock option plan
201-500 employees
Company mission
To solve user management once and for all.
Role
Who you are
- Clerk is looking for product-minded Software Engineers comfortable with Golang and ideally Typescript as well to help us build out our core authentication product
- We’re looking for people that are comfortable working across the stack to solve complex product problems for real users
- You’re comfortable writing idiomatic Golang code and and ideally also know your way around modern frontend stacks (even if not a frontend expert). Our architecture is built on top of GCP and Cloudflare with a Golang backend and React/Typescript frontend
- You value building clean and performant APIs
- Event-driven architectures, Pub/Sub patterns, and scaling challenges are familiar territory
- You set a high bar for code quality, system design, and performance — and you’re not afraid to fight for it
- You’re passionate about building for other engineers and obsess over making their experience better
- You believe in solving real customer problems, even if it means making tradeoffs behind the scenes
- You understand that the purity of your systems are second to the the outcomes they enable for our customers. The entire aim of Clerk is to take on complexity on their behalf. That can mean making tradeoffs to our own systems
- You love working on products you use yourself — because you know that’s how magic happens
What the job involves
- This backend-oriented, full-stack role will have you work on nimble teams and connect directly with customers to define and execute functionality that developers love and support builders launching and growing their businesses
- We’re a small but growing team with big ambitions. This means you’ll have responsibility far beyond closing out pre-written tickets
- Shape the Clerk authentication experience – Build, improve, and evolve Clerk’s beloved managed authentication product. Your work will directly influence how thousands of teams interact with Clerk daily
- Design and implement new product features – From features like advanced OAuth and MCP to secure session management to audit logs and observability, you’ll build new functionality that makes it easier for users to authenticate and for developers to manage their users at scale
- Improve usability and workflows – Partner with design and product to streamline the utility, clarity, and efficiency of the auth product so developers can stop worrying about auth entirely, and focus on building their own products
- Build for observability and transparency – Create data pipelines and tools that help developers understand authentication flows, diagnose issues, and gain confidence in the systems they’ve built with Clerk
- Collaborate with customers and teammates – Be part of a world-class product delivery team that cares deeply about customer needs and the value of constant iteration. We’re fully remote, which means you’ll need to practice good communication habits to keep things moving
- Execute – Clerk values engineers who execute. That means approaching work iteratively and reducing the time between feedback cycles
- Thrive in a dynamic environment – Clerk is not well suited for engineers who expect every task to be a series of predefined steps. We believe the best approach is to work through our customer’s problems in the trenches and not merely think through them from the sidelines
- Be Customer 0 – Clerk is built on top of Clerk. That means the work you do to solve our internal projects likely will also become functionality that we release to customers as well. We are looking for engineers who care deeply about product quality and want to back that up with their work
- Embrace a culture of craft by focusing on engineering quality. We want our product to be best-in-class, and so we need our team to write maintainable, performant, and well-structured code
Our take
Authentication is only part of the story when it comes to user management. Developers using API tools also face the complex UI and management issues of additional features like user sign-up, sign-in, and session management, to name a few. Clerk was founded to make this simpler, reducing hours of work to minutes using pre-built React components.
Clerk stands out in a market dominated by the likes of Auth0 and OneSpan with its focus on React rather than API. This taps into a growing number of developers working with Jamstack rather than trying to wrestle customers away from market incumbents - a smart move which has seen its userbase swell by five times, growing to over a million developers.
This rapid growth has attracted investors, and Clerk closed a Series B round in 2024. This funding is being used to expand the company's services into authorisation - determining a user's permissions as opposed to simply identifying them. As account security and management will continue to be a major focus for developers going forward, Clerk is well positioned to grow into a major player in this space, especially as it continues to expand its product range.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Oct 2025
$50m
SERIES C
Jan 2024
$30m
SERIES B
Total funding: $109m
Company benefits
- Competitive salary: We want you to know that we value the skills you bring to the table, so we go out of our way to make sure you’re fairly compensated.
- Equity ownership: At Clerk, we believe in shared success, which is why we offer a stock option plan that everyone stands to benefit from as we grow.
- Health coverage: We care about your well-being, so we offer top-tier health insurance to ensure your health needs are met. (US-based employees)
- Work equipment: We’ll make sure you have everything you need to set up your ideal home office with the gear of your choice.
- Flexible vacation policy: We're believers in work-life balance and trust you to take the time you need with our unlimited vacation policy.
- Remote and diverse team: We're committed to fostering an inclusive environment where you can do the best work of your life with a global, fully-remote team.
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Colin Sidoti
(Co-Founder)Prior to co-founding Clerk in 2019, Colin was an Independent Consultant for nearly 8 years. He also spent 1 year at We-Care.com as a Web Developer.
Braden Sidoti
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously a Member of the South Park Commons. He was also an iOS Engineering Manager at Inspirato and an iOS Developer at hostess.fm and Fuzz Productions.
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