{"id":763441,"url":"https://alion.io/job/clipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data","title":"Founding Backend Engineer – AI & Data","company":{"id":673848,"name":"Clipbook","domain":"clipbook.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/clipbook","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":68,"open_postings":17,"ghost_share":0.529,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Flink","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"RLHF","optional":true},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-03-26T14:56:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-03-26","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T09:40:23Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":222,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":222},"description":"About Clipbook\nClipbook 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.\nWe 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.\nOur 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.\nThe Role\nYou'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.\nWhat You'll Do\nArchitect & 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.\n\nDesign 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.\n\nIntegrate 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.\n\nDesign 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.\n\nDevelop 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.\n\nCollaborate 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.\n\nShape 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.\n\nWhat We're Looking For\n2-10+ years building and scaling production backend systems. You've taken systems from zero to production and owned the full lifecycle. Strong across backend fundamentals (services, data models, distributed systems), with deeper expertise in one or more areas - and a desire to keep expanding your breadth over time.\n\nGenuine excitement to build quickly & ship fast. We care about getting things into users' hands and iterating from there.\n\nYou take ownership. When something is broken or unclear, you fix it or flag it without waiting to be asked.\n\nComfortable with ambiguity. You make reasonable calls with incomplete information, communicate them clearly, and adjust as you learn more.\n\nStrong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD. We're building systems that will one day serve Fortune 500 executives in real-time - so reliability matters. Familiarity with AWS/GCP, containerization (Docker/K8s), and CI/CD pipelines ensures we can deliver high uptime and iterate quickly.\n\nA future leader. You'll help shape our engineering culture and can quickly grow into leadership as the company scales.\n\nTechnical Areas Where Depth Matters (one or more)\nData Engineering: Spark, Kafka, Flink, BigQuery, streaming pipelines, ETL at scale.\n\nDistributed Systems: High-volume scaling, fault tolerance, eventual consistency.\n\nAI/ML: LLMs in production, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, inference optimization.\n\nBackend: Python, Node.js, PostgreSQL, high-concurrency systems.\n\nNice-to-Haves\nComputer vision or multimodal model experience (audio, video, image). This is central to our product, so it's a meaningful differentiator.\n\nSemantic search, vector databases, or meaning-aware retrieval.\n\nLLM fine-tuning, RLHF, or eval pipelines.\n\nWeb scraping and API integrations at scale.\n\nStartup founder or early-stage experience is a huge plus.\n\nWhat This Role Is Not\nWe're hiring for the application and data layer. This probably isn't the right fit if your background is primarily in firmware, embedded systems, hardware engineering, networking, or infrastructure/DevOps.\nA Few Things Worth Knowing\nWe care more about what you ship than when or where you work, but this is an early-stage company growing fast. The pace reflects that. Our culture is intense and driven by H&H (hunger and hustle).\n\nAs one of the first engineers, you'll wear a lot of hats. There's no platform team to hand things off to yet.\n\nCompensation & Benefits\nSalary: $150K-$220K\n\nEquity: Early-stage grant with significant upside\n\nBenefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k), unlimited PTO\n\nGrowth: A clear path to engineering leadership as we scale","description_format":"text","description_chars":5437,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Media & Audience Measurement"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T19:12:01Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T06:01:58Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.138,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":222,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","ghost","win:tail","crowd:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/clipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/clipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T12:09:57Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18264,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":673848},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=673848"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fclipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fclipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fclipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/clipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fclipbook-founding-backend-engineer-ai-data"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":763441}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"clipbook.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":763441},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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