[Remote] Founding Backend Engineer – AI & Data

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Clipbook builds AI-powered media monitoring and analytics tools for communications, PR, and public affairs teams. As a Founding Backend Engineer, you will architect and build core backend systems, design scalable data infrastructure, and integrate AI into real-world workflows, all while shaping the engineering culture of the company.

Responsibilities

• Architect & build core backend systems. Drive architectural decisions across our backend stack (Python, Node.js, PostgreSQL). Own features from concept → deployment → observing users rely on what you built. We're still laying critical foundations, so we value a pragmatic, "strong opinions, weakly held" mindset — especially when decisions are expensive to unwind later
• Design scalable data infrastructure. Build and maintain pipelines for ingesting, normalizing, deduplicating, indexing, and querying massive, multi-modal datasets (text, audio, video) across news, social media, policy, and more. A lot of this is normalization, deduplication, and edge case handling
• Integrate AI into real-world workflows. Put LLMs and ML models into production for real workflows: RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt execution, agentic systems, fine-tuned models. Production means reliable, monitored, and cost-conscious
• Design systems that scale. Build systems that will hold up as we grow 10x, while being practical about what to invest in now vs. what can wait
• Develop performant APIs and services. Create robust interfaces and internal services that power our product end-to-end, ensuring reliability, security, and a seamless experience for customers
• Collaborate closely with users. Join customer calls, hear what's working and what isn't, and build in response. Rapidly iterate to deliver solutions that genuinely move the needle for comms/public affairs teams
• Shape Clipbook's engineering culture. As one of the first engineers, you'll influence everything — code quality, system design principles, documentation standards, and how we build as a team. We believe leaders stay hands-on: even as we grow, everyone (including managers) continues to ship

Skills

• 2–10+ years building and scaling production backend systems
• Strong across backend fundamentals (services, data models, distributed systems), with deeper expertise in one or more areas
• Genuine excitement to build quickly & ship fast
• You take ownership. When something is broken or unclear, you fix it or flag it without waiting to be asked
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You make reasonable calls with incomplete information, communicate them clearly, and adjust as you learn more
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD
• A future leader. You'll help shape our engineering culture and can quickly grow into leadership as the company scales
• Architect & build core backend systems
• Design scalable data infrastructure
• Integrate AI into real-world workflows
• Design systems that scale
• Develop performant APIs and services
• Collaborate closely with users
• Computer vision or multimodal model experience (audio, video, image)
• Semantic search, vector databases, or meaning-aware retrieval
• LLM fine-tuning, RLHF, or eval pipelines
• Web scraping and API integrations at scale
• Startup founder or early-stage experience

Benefits

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• 401(k)
• Unlimited PTO

Company Overview