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Founding Engineer

Clera · San Francisco, United States

Other EngineeringQuick applyfull-timeabout 16 hours ago

About The Role

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're an early-stage, fast-growing enterprise AI platform (agentic operating system for businesses) that has achieved strong product-market fit and is growing revenue rapidly. Backed by Y Combinator and prominent angel investors from the AI and SaaS world, we have thousands of AI agents deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies today.

This is a founding engineer role — you'll operate at near-CTO level, taking vague problems all the way to shipped product with no hand-holding. You'll be backend-heavy and AI-native, but fully capable of going full-stack when needed. If you've ever wanted to shape a product and company from the ground up, this is that seat.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

  • Own large product areas end-to-end — from user insight through to production
  • Build and continuously improve our agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability
  • Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures
  • Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that actually solve problems
  • Ship full-stack when needed: Go backend, React + Vite (TypeScript) frontend
  • Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and ruthless self-scaling
  • Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase
  • Design and work with APIs (REST and/or gRPC) in microservices architectures
  • Own CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production observability

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves

  • Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang) — this is a dealbreaker
  • Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
  • Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript
  • Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and production monitoring/observability
  • Experience building and consuming APIs (REST and/or gRPC) in microservices environments
  • 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

Strong pluses

  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Prior experience with AI infrastructure, prompt engineering, model deployment, or agent orchestration
  • Experience designing and shipping AI-driven products; familiarity with agentic AI systems, LLMs, or AI agents
  • Previous startup experience or a founding/early engineer background
  • Experience with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL, with solid understanding of data storage trade-offs
  • AI research background or experience at an AI tooling/coding startup
  • Former founder — or someone who has built something meaningful from scratch (startup, side project, shipped feature)
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

You thrive if you

  • Are a sharp, autonomous problem-solver who doesn't need a PM to decide what to build
  • Have deep product sense and build for users, not for code's sake
  • Are obsessed with using and building AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)
  • Love clean, maintainable Go and hold high standards in code review
  • Thrive in ambiguity and move fast without sacrificing quality

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

  • Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually, reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role
  • Equity: Generous equity package commensurate with a founding-level position
  • Unlimited AI tooling budget — we practice what we preach
  • A seat at the table: you will shape the product and the company's direction

LOCATION

  • On-site in San Francisco, CA
  • Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must be authorized to work in the United States

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