Forward-Deloyed Engineer
New York / San Francisco
Engineering /
Full-time /
Hybrid
Clipbook’s mission: reinvent how leaders listen to and engage with the world of information that comes out every day.
Our platform ingests, comprehends, summarizes, and surfaces insights and actions from traditional news, TV, podcast, social media, and internet data at scale—across text, audio, and video in real time.
We bootstrapped to $2M ARR and profitability before raising $3.3 million (led by Mark Cuban, the best investor in comms) to accelerate growth. We’re working with 250+ clients like the City of New York, Gates Foundation, and Taco Bell.
Our goal: we want to be the definitive vertical AI company for communications
What You'll Do
- Embed with customers. Work closely with comms and public affairs teams to understand their workflows and pain points. Design and deliver solutions that feel tailor-made but scale across accounts.
- Build & deploy. Own integrations, data pipelines, and product customizations (Python, TypeScript, SQL/NoSQL). Move fast from concept to customer impact.
- Act as a bridge. Capture field intelligence and feed it back into product and engineering. Ensure what we build matches what high-value users need.
- Solve diverse technical challenges. From standing up real-time ingestion pipelines, to packaging AI/ML features for enterprise usability, to optimizing cloud deployments for scale.
- Drive adoption. Partner with Customer Success and Sales to ensure pilots turn into long-term contracts. Build credibility as the technical face of Clipbook.
- Shape Clipbook’s culture. As an early hire, set standards for how we work with customers, document solutions, and create repeatable playbooks.
What We’re Looking For
- 3–6+ years of technical experience in software engineering, data engineering, or solutions engineering. You don’t need to be a specialist in everything, but you’re confident owning end-to-end technical delivery.
- Strong customer orientation. You thrive in conversations with users, can ask the right questions, and translate needs into solutions.
- Bias for action. You’re pragmatic, comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, and default to shipping.
- Full-stack problem solver. Comfortable across Python/TypeScript/SQL/Node. Able to debug APIs, build quick integrations, and optimize data flows.
- Cloud & data fluency. Familiarity with AWS/GCP, containerization (Docker/K8s), CI/CD pipelines, and scaling data architectures.
- Hybrid mindset. Excited to be in-office 3–4x/week with the team (NYC / SF / DC), because customer problems get solved faster face-to-face.
Bonus Points
- Experience in early-stage startups or as a technical founder is a huge plu
- Hands-on experience with LLMs (fine-tuning, RAG, RLHF)
- Experience building data pipelines, scrapers, or integrations (Playwright, Puppeteer, REST/GraphQL APIs)
- Previous startup or technical founder experience
- Background in consulting, customer-facing engineering, or forward-deployed or solutions engineering roles
Why Join Us as a Founding Engineer?
- Shape the future. You’ll be one of the very first engineers, owning core architecture and product decisions that will define Clipbook for years to come.
- Direct customer impact. Build and ship features used by 250+ customers, with instant feedback and visible impact.
- Technical challenges. Tackle the hardest problems in AI, semantic search, and large-scale data engineering-across all media modalities. E.g. how do you ingest a podcast that captures the feeling of it, and not just the transcript?
- High autonomy. No bureaucracy. You’ll have a blank canvas, massive influence, and a direct line to both customers and founders.
- Career-defining opportunity. This is a rare chance to build a category-defining product and company from the ground up, with outsized equity and leadership potential.
$140,000 - $170,000 a year
Compensation: $140–$170k salary, high-upside equity (from a team that understands commercial rigor and bootstrapping to 7-figures: pre-seed dilution but with Series A metrics), and full benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k, unlimited PTO).
Impact: Direct line to customers and founders. See your work drive revenue and adoption in real time.
Growth: Pathway into leadership, whether on the technical or go-to-market side.
Culture: High trust, low ego, fast-moving. We obsess over solving real customer problems, not playing corporate games.
Mission: Join a team passionate about helping leaders cut through the noise of the world’s information chaos.
