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Close is a bootstrapped, profitable CRM platform founded in 2013 that helps small and scaling businesses sell faster. The company is 100% remote with 120 employees and is now embedding AI throughout the product.
The CRM team owns the core customer-facing features: leads, contacts, opportunities, tasks, activities, custom objects, and search. The team is undertaking a major rearchitecture of Close's data model—the largest engineering effort currently underway—to modernize assumptions made a decade ago and create flexibility for small, scaling business customers. This involves a series of migrations and rearchitecture projects that are both greenfield and complex.
In this role, you will rearchitect the core CRM data model to improve how leads, contacts, opportunities, and custom objects relate to each other, enabling customers to represent their business structure flexibly. You'll build AI-native CRM features, including agentic enrichment (agents research data fields automatically rather than relying on third-party providers) and AI-powered data cleaning. You'll also make Close usable by AI agents through MCP-compatible tools and endpoints that expose CRM data and actions without requiring knowledge of Close's private query language. Additionally, you'll optimize hot paths (lead discovery, deal updates, pipeline scanning, bulk actions) to ensure salespeople experience fast performance across hundreds of weekly interactions.
The tech stack includes Python, Flask, FastAPI, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Redis, TaskTiger, and MCP. Infrastructure runs on AWS (EKS, MSK, RDS, ElastiCache, EC2) with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and Ansible. The company emphasizes open-source contributions and maintains public APIs and developer documentation.
Close values long-term thinking, transparency, strong relationships, discipline, and continuous improvement. The company offers competitive compensation with goal-based bonuses, ~5 weeks PTO (plus 1-week winter break and paid US holidays), an 80% work option (4-day week at 80% pay), paid parental leave, a 1-month paid sabbatical every 5 years, comprehensive healthcare (99% premium coverage for US residents), and 401k matching up to 6% (vested immediately). The entire team gathers annually in person; the 2027 retreat is in Düsseldorf, Germany.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Seasoned backend engineer with deep Python expertise; experience with Go, Rust, or TypeScript is a plus
- Architecturally minded: experience designing systems others build on, planning zero-downtime migrations, and sequencing rearchitecture into independently shippable pieces
- Strong focus on data model and retrieval problems: schemas, relationships, normalization, query design, type systems
- Experience with search systems, especially Elasticsearch (Lucene internals, query planning, relevance, indexing at scale)
- Proven track record shipping meaningful LLM-backed or agentic features to production users
- Comfortable using AI tools daily in your own workflow to ship faster and reason about unfamiliar code
- Battle-tested: experience debugging latency issues, owning critical systems, or carrying pager responsibility
- Builder mindset: preference for shipping a working v1 quickly over spending weeks on abstractions
