Co-Founder & CTO
Clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
Join an early-stage creative AI and advertising company as a full-time technical co-founder and CTO. You will shape technical and research strategy, build a platform that learns from creative workflows and outcomes, and lead the initial engineering and research team.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Set technical and research strategy, evolving existing workflows into a proprietary training and evaluation platform.
- Build data infrastructure connecting creative briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, critiques, and campaign outcomes.
- Develop systems to evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
- Design budget allocation policies that guide campaigns and support useful data collection.
- Choose approaches across frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research.
- Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, campaigns, experimentation, training, and inference.
- Establish standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
- Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team, working directly with creators and brands.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Substantial experience in AI research or post-training, including hands-on preference or reward modeling, RLHF, reinforcement learning, or evaluation of subjective outputs.
- Experience shipping products or features used by people, and owning a model, evaluation, or infrastructure program end to end.
- Strong background in causal inference with observational data, including selection bias, counterfactual or off-policy evaluation, and adaptive experimentation.
- Experience with production ML infrastructure and ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to business outcomes.
- Comfort learning from noisy, delayed, or subjective outcomes and a record of recruiting and leading technical talent.
- Experience with Python and relevant areas such as bandits, sequential allocation, online experimentation, multimodal ML, agents, planning, or hierarchical modeling is valuable.
- Willingness to commit full-time, work on-site in San Francisco, and take equal co-founder responsibility in an early-stage environment.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Equity is approximately 28% as a co-founder. Cash compensation is discussed based on circumstances and fit. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.