Founding Engineer
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
Join a well-funded (Series A/B), stealth-stage consumer tech startup building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform. The product helps people figure out where to go and what to do — combining one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events with a clever, social product experience.
As a Founding Engineer, you'll own problems end-to-end, work directly with founders, and make architectural decisions that shape the core system. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast.
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON
- Search and ranking at massive scale (200M+ places, millions of events)
- Recommendations and personalization of places and events using embeddings, structured data, and social signals
- Real-time infrastructure — chat, presence, and location systems that feel instantaneous
- AI agent pipelines that plan, retrieve, and reason over diverse data sources
- Map display algorithms that determine what deserves attention
- Data pipelines that structure large volumes of unstructured web data for novel product experiences
- Pushing Elasticsearch and vector search to sub-100ms latency across large datasets
ENGINEERING TRACKS
You don't need to fit neatly into one area — most people here won't.
Application Engineer (Full-Stack)
- Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile and web
- Own features end-to-end from UI to backend
- Tools: TypeScript, React, React Native, iOS/Android
Data / AI Engineer
- Build the intelligence layer — search, ranking, pipelines, and agent systems
- Design systems that operate over large-scale, messy real-world data
- Tools: Python, TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs, embeddings, retrieval and recommendation systems
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience
- Proven experience building real-time or low-latency production systems
- Proficiency in search, ranking algorithms, and related infrastructure
- Experience with data processing pipelines, ML/AI workflows, or data engineering
- Track record of infrastructure and performance optimization at scale
- Prior experience at early-stage startups; comfortable operating with high ambiguity
- Ability to own features end-to-end with cross-functional collaboration (product, design, engineering)
- Strong problem-solving and fast decision-making in fast-paced environments
- You care about how something feels, not just whether it works
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually
- Equity as a founding team member
LOCATION
- San Francisco, CA — on-site required
- Candidates must be located in or willing to relocate to San Francisco
- No visa sponsorship available — must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship