Backend Engineer - Team Platform

Clerk is looking for platform-minded Software Engineers to help us improve the core foundations of our product. This role is a mixture of building APIs and services to handle our increasing scale and ambitions - as well as participating meaningfully alongside your SRE / Infrastructure teammates to ensure stability and reliability.

About Clerk

Clerk is on a mission to solve user management once and for all. We are a globally distributed team dedicated to providing best-in-class developer experience, with obsessive attention to every detail. Today, we provide developers with full-stack React components and hooks like <SignUp/>, <SignIn/>, <UserProfile/>, useUser, and useOrganization. These APIs allow developers to build hard-to-get-right user and organization management flows. We believe that a component is worth a thousand APIs.

Our Platform is what sits at the foundation of every part of Clerk. Its the unsung hero of each feature and any future features we intend to build.

What you will do

We’re a small but growing team with big ambitions. This means you’ll have responsibility far beyond closing out pre-sliced tickets. We’re looking for people that are comfortable working across the stack to solve product problems for real users.

We will expect you to:

• Own the core services that other teams are building upon - being a platform team means every team around you relies on the work you produce. You’ll have an immense opportunity to create leverage in the business

• Help us scale our architecture intelligently - as our customer’s continue to succeed and we continue to onboard new exiting businesses into Clerk, our scale is increasing rapidly. In addition to this compounding rate of growth, we also are rapidly expanding our product offering which means more surface area to manage

• Continually progress our tooling - as a business that builds dev tools, its crucial we’re exploring and understanding emerging technologies and understanding their trade-offs

• Collaborate with teammates to release new features - we have a world-class Engineering team that is fantastic at owning the many parts of the stack but often they need support from our Platform team to make sure they have the building blocks to be successful

• 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. This is one of the most unique and exciting parts of Clerk

• 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.

Who you are

You’re excited by the challenges that come with owning the core foundations of Clerk. This position sits at the intersection of a few traditional areas. If you’re equally excited about building an API service that can handle immense amounts of throughput, enabling exciting new capabilities for our customers, and care deeply about reliability, then this position is for you.

• You’re comfortable writing idiomatic Golang code and have familiarity with Typescript (our architecture is built on top of GCP as well as Cloudflare).

• You’re passionate about performance and infrastructure challenges like Distributed Systems but you’re pragmatic and value “choosing boring solutions”.

• You have deep familiarity with common systems architectural patterns like Event-driven / Pub/Sub.

• You’re comfortable establishing high quality patterns that other developers adhere to and you fight to maintain those high standards as the product grows in maturity.

• You’re comfortable building for the most critical user base; other engineers.

• You understand that the purity of your systems are second to t