Backend Engineer at Clerk

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.

About the role

Clerk is looking for product-minded Software Engineers comfortable with Golang and ideally Typescript as well to help us build out our core authentication product. This backend-oriented, full-stack role will have you work on nimble teams and connect directly with customers to define and execute functionality that developers love and support builders launching and growing their businesses.

What you’ll do

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

• Shape the Clerk authentication experience – Build, improve, and evolve Clerk’s beloved managed authentication product. Your work will directly influence how thousands of teams interact with Clerk daily.

• Design and implement new product features – From features like advanced OAuth and MCP to secure session management to audit logs and observability, you’ll build new functionality that makes it easier for users to authenticate and for developers to manage their users at scale.

• Improve usability and workflows – Partner with design and product to streamline the utility, clarity, and efficiency of the auth product so developers can stop worrying about auth entirely, and focus on building their own products.

• Build for observability and transparency – Create data pipelines and tools that help developers understand authentication flows, diagnose issues, and gain confidence in the systems they’ve built with Clerk.

• Collaborate with customers and teammates – Be part of a world-class product delivery team that cares deeply about customer needs and the value of constant iteration. We’re fully remote, which means you’ll need to practice good communication habits to keep things moving.

• Execute – Clerk values engineers who execute. That means approaching work iteratively and reducing the time between feedback cycles.

• Thrive in a dynamic environment – Clerk is not well suited for engineers who expect every task to be a series of predefined steps. We believe the best approach is to work through our customer’s problems in the trenches and not merely think through them from the sidelines.

• 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. We are looking for engineers who care deeply about product quality and want to back that up with their work.

• 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 comfortable writing idiomatic Golang code and and ideally also know your way around modern frontend stacks (even if not a frontend expert). Our architecture is built on top of GCP and Cloudflare with a Golang backend and React/Typescript frontend.

• You value building clean and performant APIs

• Event-driven architectures, Pub/Sub patterns, and scaling challenges are familiar territory.

• You set a high bar for code quality, system design, and performance — and you’re not afraid to fight for it.

• You’re passionate about building for other engineers and obsess over making their experience better.

• You believe in solving real customer problems, even if it means making tradeoffs behind the scenes.

• You understand that the purity of your systems are second to the the outcomes they enable for our customers. The entire aim of Clerk is to take on complexity on their behalf. That can mean making tradeoffs to our own systems.

• You love working on products you use yourself — because you know that’s how magic happens.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary – We want you to know that we value the skills and experience you bring to the table. We go out of our way to make sure that you feel fairly compensated.

• Equity Ownership – At Clerk, we believe in shared success. That's why we offer a stock option plan so that everyone can benefit from the growth and prosperity of the company.

• Work Gear - Set up your ideal home office with the gear of your choice. At Clerk, we want to ensure that you have everything you need to perform at your best.

• Flexible Vacation Policy – We believe in work-life balance and trust you to take the time you need. Although we recommend 25 days per year, our vacation policy is unlimited. This is in addition to observing national holidays specific to your country of residence.

• Diverse and Inclusive Team – Join our exceptional, diverse, and globally distributed team at Clerk. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can contribute their best in building impactful products and tools for the modern web.