Founding Engineer
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
A YC-backed enterprise AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their small, high-output team in San Francisco. The company is building an agentic operating system for the enterprise, with thousands of agents already deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies. They have strong product-market fit and are growing revenue rapidly month-over-month.
This is a founding-level role with CTO-level expectations. You'll take vague problems, scope them, build them end-to-end, and ship things that create real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You need to be a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer rolled into one. Former founders are especially encouraged to apply.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight all the way to production
- Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability
- Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, agent architectures
- Talk to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems
- Ship full-stack when needed (Go backend, Vite + React + TypeScript frontend)
- Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and self-scaling workflows
- Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Must-haves (dealbreakers):
- Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang)
- Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
Required skills:
- Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production monitoring/observability
- Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures
- 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)
Strong pluses:
- Prior startup experience or time as a founding/early engineer
- Experience building AI-driven products — agentic systems, LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience with relational (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL databases
- AI research background or experience at an AI coding or tooling startup
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
You'll thrive here if you:
- Have razor-sharp problem-solving instincts and move fast without sacrificing quality
- Love Go and care about clean, maintainable code
- Are obsessed with AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)
- Thrive in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build
- Have built something from scratch before: a startup, a side project, or a feature that shipped and mattered
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually
- Generous equity reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role
- Unlimited AI tooling budget
- A true seat at the table — you'll shape the product and the company's direction
LOCATION
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.