Co-Founder & CTO
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
Join an AI-powered creative advertising startup as a full-time technical co-founder and CTO. You will own the technical and research direction, building on an existing product to develop systems that learn from creative work and its real-world performance.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Set the technical and research strategy, from current workflows through a proprietary training and evaluation platform.
- Build data infrastructure connecting creative briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, feedback, and campaign outcomes.
- Develop systems to evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
- Design allocation policies that direct campaign budgets and inform data collection.
- Choose where to apply frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research.
- Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, campaigns, experimentation, model training, and inference.
- Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
- Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team, while working directly with creators and brands.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least 3 years of relevant experience, with hands-on work building preference or reward models, including RLHF, ranking, or evaluation systems.
- Experience with causal inference on observational data, such as selection bias, off-policy evaluation, counterfactual analysis, or adaptive experimentation.
- A track record of shipping products used by people, building production ML infrastructure, and owning model, evaluation, or infrastructure programs end to end.
- Background in ads, marketplaces, recommenders, or ranking systems tied to business outcomes, including experience with noisy, delayed, or subjective feedback.
- Strong technical leadership and recruiting experience. Bandits, sequential allocation, multimodal systems, agents, or latent-variable modeling are valuable.
- Ready to work full time, in person, as an equal co-founder in an early-stage environment.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Equity of 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.