Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer

Department: Product and Engineering

Location: United States

Employment Type: FullTime

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 across the stack. Make architectural decisions and implement solutions across the stack (Next.js, TypeScript, React, Python, Node, SQL/NoSQL). You have the conviction to quickly build from concept to deployment to seeing clients love our product.

• Collaborate with customers. Work directly with users to understand pain points, join calls, hear what's working and what isn't, and rapidly iterate to deliver solutions that matter.

• Tackle a wide breadth of engineering challenges. Our work spans AI, data engineering, backend, frontend, and more — so there's plenty of opportunity to find projects that match your strengths and interests. Some examples include:

  • AI/ML Integration: Productionize LLMs and classical ML models for real-world, high-uptime applications — including prompt execution, embeddings, RAG pipelines, and agentic systems. Leverage the latest in generative AI tooling and frameworks.

  • Data Engineering: Build pipelines and infrastructure for ingesting, normalizing, and querying massive, multi-modal datasets (text, audio, video).

• Shape Clipbook's engineering culture. As one of the first engineers, you'll influence everything — code quality, system design principles, documentation standards, testing, deployment, and how we build as a team. You'll mentor future hires and drive best practices. We believe leaders stay hands-on: even as we grow, everyone (including managers) continues to ship.

What We're Looking For

• 2–10+ years of relevant engineering experience at tech and product-driven companies. You've taken systems from zero to production and owned the full lifecycle.

• Proficiency with web technologies (Next.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, etc.)

• Genuine excitement to build quickly & ship fast. We care about getting things into users' hands and iterating from there.

• Deep knowledge and practical experience with cloud-based services, containerization, and API development.

• Experience optimizing data architectures for performance and cost.

• 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 product sense and bias for action. We're a small team and can't afford analysis paralysis — we make decisions with incomplete information and learn from real customer feedback.

• A future leader. You'll help shape our engineering culture and can quickly grow into engineering leadership as the company scales.

Bonus Points

• Experience with any of the following:

  • LLM fine-tuning, RAG, RLHF, or eval pipelines

  • Computer vision or multimodal model experience (audio, video, image)

  • Semantic search, vector databases, or meaning-aware retrieval

  • Familiarity with web scraping frameworks (Playwright, Puppeteer) and different types of API integrations (REST, GraphQL)

  • Comfort with asynchronous workflows, rate-limiting, and distributed systems

• Startup founder or early-stage experience is a huge plus.

What This Role Is Not

We're hiring across the full stack with a focus on building product. This probably isn't the right fit if your background is primarily in firmware, embedded systems, hardware engineering, networking, or infrastructure/DevOps.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

• We 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).

• As one of the first engineers, you'll wear a lot of hats. There's no platform team to hand things off to yet.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150K–$220K

• Equity: Early-stage grant with significant upside

• Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k), unlimited PTO

Growth: A clear path to engineering leadership as we scale