Founding Backend Engineer – AI & Data

About this role

## About Clipbook

Clipbook builds AI-powered media monitoring and analytics tools for communications, PR, and public affairs teams. We help them track, search, and make sense of coverage across text, audio, and video.

We launched in 2023 and have grown to 200+ clients including BCG, Weber Shandwick, and dozens of government agencies. We bootstrapped to seven-figures in ARR before raising a $3.3M seed round (co-led by Mark Cuban). We plan to raise our Series A this year and we are aiming for eight-figures revenue by end of year.

Our founding team has backgrounds at BCG, Bain, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the White House, and Congress, and has previously built startups backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Coatue, and NFX.

## The Role

You'd be one of the first engineers at Clipbook — joining a small but mighty engineering team with engineers from Meta, Stripe, and AWS. You'll have real influence over architecture and technical direction, and what you build will ship to 200+ customers quickly.

## What You'll Do

• **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 ...