Founding Engineer
Clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
Join an early-stage AI company as its first engineering hire, working directly with the founder in San Francisco. You will evolve a working AI workforce product into reliable infrastructure designed to scale, with the opportunity to grow into a CTO role as the work and team develop.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Rebuild the product foundation to support substantial user growth and production workloads.
- Design and operate the agent runtime, including orchestration, memory, verification, and reliability systems.
- Own technical work across backend, infrastructure, frontend, and agent systems, as company needs evolve.
- Set the technical architecture, stack, engineering standards, and development practices.
- Ship improvements weekly to customers using the product in live service businesses.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least two years shipping production software, or an equivalent record as a founder or solo builder; exceptional early-career engineers are also considered.
- Full-stack range, with the ability to work from backend and infrastructure through product UI.
- Experience building and operating LLM or AI agent systems used by real customers, not demo-only projects.
- Experience turning prototypes into production infrastructure, including architecture, data models, runtimes, and orchestration.
- Evidence of owning technical decisions in a small or early-stage team, and shipping to production users weekly or faster.
- Useful experience includes agent orchestration, memory, evaluations, verification, multi-agent workflows, or software for recruiting, agencies, and other service businesses.
- Strong technical fundamentals and the ability to explain the difficult parts of systems you have built.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary is $150,000 to $250,000 USD annually, plus meaningful founding equity. Visa sponsorship and relocation support are available.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California. The founding team works together in person.