Senior Software Engineer, Close
Backend
$140-210k
+ Bonus
CRM for small scaling businesses
Open for applications
CRM for small scaling businesses
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$140-210k
+ Bonus
101-200 employees
Company mission
To help startups and SMBs grow. Since 2013, we’ve been building a CRM that focuses on better communication, without the hassle of manual data entry or complex UI.
Role
Who you are
- A seasoned engineer. Python is our backbone, but perhaps you’ve worked across Go, Rust, or TypeScript. You pick the right tool for the problem rather than retreating to what you know. You’ve seen a variety of problems, can collaborate and self direct
- Building AI. You've shipped LLM-backed features for real users and have a POV on where they're trustworthy, where they fall over, and how to get them production-ready when customers bet revenue on the output. We use Pydantic, Temporal, LangFuse, and other modern AI infrastructure tooling to power our agent platform
- Working with AI in your day-to-day. You use AI tools in your own workflow to ship faster, write tighter code, and reason about unfamiliar parts of the codebase. We fund the use of AI tools (Claude Code, Codex and other best-in-class developer tools) and treat learning and experimentation as part of the work
- A builder first. You’d rather get the first iteration of a feature in front of fifty customers than spend three weeks fretting over a perfect PR. You ship
- Opinionated about API design for modern software. You've shipped internet-facing APIs and you think about who's on the other end - apps, agents, humans poking around in docs - and what each of them needs
- Battle-tested. You've debugged incidents where latency budgets didn't hold, owned a system everyone else relied on, or carried a pager for something with real customer impact
What the job involves
- When you apply, you’ll have an opportunity to highlight the team that appeals to you the most. We’ll do our best to honor this preference, but we’ll be also be evaluating skillset fit and the need of the business at any time
- One thing to know up front: we do move people between teams as the work shifts. Most engineers here end up on more than one team over their time at Close - this team is where you’ll start, but over time you’ll likely have the opportunity to work on many different projects
- The work splits roughly like this. Pick the team that excites you most:
- Agents. Build Close’s agentic platform and customer-facing AI experiences. Voice Agents, Custom Agents, and Ask Chloe are already in flight. You’d work on the shared intelligence and orchestration layer that powers AI-driven processes across the product. That includes the ecosystem around our APIs and MCP surface, which enables external agents like Claude and ChatGPT to operate Close. This team is pushing deeper into applied AI, retrieval, and agent infrastructure more than ever before
- Communications. Own the voice, SMS, and email infrastructure powering Close — Twilio, WebRTC, WebSockets, AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, and more. You’ll help build our voice, messaging, and conversational AI agents while scaling real-time AI across calls, email, and calendar sync infrastructure
- CRM. Build the structured context layer that humans and agents both depend on. We're rebuilding the data model so it flexes with real businesses, making the CRM agent-ready (retrieval, traversal, action coverage through MCP and our public API), and shipping the next generation of AI-native CRM features (AI Enrich, Autofill, AI Search). Operating on billions of Mongo documents with Elasticsearch underneath
- Growth. Run the experiments and own the billing infrastructure that turn trials into paid customers. Stripe metered billing, AI credit top-ups, the activation and conversion funnel, and the team's biggest bet right now: agentic onboarding (an agent that walks new customers through setup, configuration, and first comms). Hypothesis-driven, metric-first
Our take
Close is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that has helped a diverse range of companies scale their teams and acquire more customers. Founded in 2013 by serial entrepreneur Steli Efti, the company was initially propelled by the Y Combinator scheme.
Close was originally a spinoff of a parent company named Elastic Sales. The software that became the basis for Close was built to run sales campaigns for Elastic’s customers. Understanding the market appeal and potential of Close as a standalone product, Elastic was eventually shut down in favor of a refocus on the CRM software.
Close is a bootstrapped company that has expanded rapidly. They have attracted some particularly fast scaling sales teams, including customer.io, toggl, and Hipcamp. Going forward they are focusing on product development and marketing efforts, aiming to become the leader in the CRM space for sales teams.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
46% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Aug 2013
$0.3m
SEED
Mar 2011
$0.2m
SEED
Total funding: $0.4m
Company benefits
- Paid time off and family leave
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Company goal-based bonus
- 5 weeks PTO + Winter Holiday Break
- Flexible working hours
- 100% remote company (we believe in trust and autonomy)
- Choose between working 5 days/wk (standard full-time) or 4 days/wk @ 80% pay
- Quarterly virtual summits
- 1 month paid sabbatical every 5 years
- 401k with 6% match
- Dependent care FSA (US residents)
Leadership
Steli Efti
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Owner at Whittibar Workshops and Teletrance, CEO of Supercool School and Senior Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund.
Anthony Nemitz
(Co-Founder & COO)Previously worked in Product and Engineering at eBay.
Thomas Steinacher
(Co-Founder & CTO)Also co-founder of Elastic. Previously co-founded SwipeGood.
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