Staff Software Engineer

About this role

Staff Software Engineer - Backend & AI

Location: San Francisco, CA (In-office)

About Clerk Chat

Clerk Chat's mission is to make every business conversational. We are achieving this by building the leading messaging application, integrating AI where it matters, and crafting our own telecom infrastructure. It's big and bold and needs spirited adventurers to join our growing team.

We've built Clerk Chat organically into a profitable business over the last 2 years. We're a team that believes in achieving your highest potential but not at the expense of work-life balance. That's why we have flexible vacation time, healthy quarterly bonuses, and creative freedom at the forefront. We're Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs who have sold companies, gone through HF0, and built teams at Lucasfilms, Samsung, Netflix, DocuSign, and Series B+ Startups.

What does a work environment look like at Clerk Chat?

Clerk Chat is an in-office team based just three blocks south of the Embarcadero BART station, making it easy to commute and stay connected. We love being in the office five days a week because it fosters real-time collaboration, builds stronger relationships, and helps us move faster. This is an exciting time to join Clerk Chat. We're small enough that every individual has a big impact, but we're growing fast enough that there's tremendous room for career advancement.

Who You Are

As a Staff Software Engineer focused on Backend & AI, you are a technical leader who thrives at the intersection of systems engineering and applied AI. You're obsessed with building reliable, low-latency infrastructure and equally passionate about crafting prompts and orchestration layers that make AI feel magical. You understand that great AI products aren't just about the models—they're about the systems that surround them. You take ownership of complex problems, influence technical direction across teams, and elevate those around you.

What You Will Do

• Design and build backend systems that power real-time voice AI at scale, with a relentless focus on latency, reliability, and observability

• Develop and refine AI prompting strategies for conversational voice agents, optimizing for natural dialogue, accuracy, and edge-case handling

• Own the AI orchestration layer—from prompt engineering to context management, tool calling, and response streaming

• Drive architectural decisions that shape our voice AI pipeline, including integration with STT, TTS, and LLM providers

• Build evaluation frameworks to measure and iterate on AI performance, including automated testing for prompt quality and regression detection

• Collaborate closely with product and customers to translate real-world use cases into robust AI behaviors

• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the organization

• Contribute to technical strategy as a key voice in how we build and scale our platform

What You Will Need

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent in backend or infrastructure roles

• Deep expertise in Python or Go (or similar languages) for building production systems

• Hands-on experience with LLMs—prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG architectures, or building AI-powered features