Founding Engineer - Infrastructure
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
This is the first infrastructure hire at a seed-stage agentic integration platform, working directly with the CTO on a clear leadership track. You will own the full infra and platform layer from day one, setting the patterns every future infrastructure hire builds on. The work is foundational: what you ship defines how the product scales.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Design and operate a mini cloud platform providing durable execution, sandboxed isolation, and self-healing for an integration runtime.
- Build and scale the agent infrastructure that runs coding agents writing, testing, and deploying integration code in production.
- Implement full observability across logs, metrics, and tracing for every integration and agent.
- Ship a self-hostable, single-tenant deployment of the platform as a standalone product.
- Set engineering patterns that every future infrastructure hire will follow.
- Help recruit and, within roughly a year, grow into leading the infrastructure team.
- Work as a peer to the founding team and ship to production constantly.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- 3 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, ideally at a high-growth startup backed by a top-tier investor or founded/co-founded by you.
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, or US-based with a firm, dated plan to relocate there; able to work on-site five days a week.
- Hands-on experience operating, scaling, and debugging Kubernetes in production.
- End-to-end ownership of cloud infrastructure or a platform, not just contribution to one.
- Strong observability experience covering logs, metrics, and distributed tracing.
- Experience building or shipping self-hostable, single-tenant product deployments is a plus.
- Comfortable using AI coding agents effectively while maintaining production-quality engineering judgment.
- Solid CS or quantitative fundamentals from a university degree (completed or in progress); strong academic foundations preferred.
- Fluency with TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Docker alongside Kubernetes.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Salary range: $175,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship (O-1) is available for qualified candidates.
LOCATION
On-site, five days a week in San Francisco, CA, United States.