What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Engineer position at Clera?
About The Role
We're an early-stage, fast-growing enterprise AI platform (agentic operating system for businesses) that has achieved strong product-market fit and is growing revenue rapidly. Backed by Y Combinator and prominent angel investors from the AI and SaaS world, we have thousands of AI agents deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies today.
This is a founding engineer role — you'll operate at near-CTO level, taking vague problems all the way to shipped product with no hand-holding. You'll be backend-heavy and AI-native, but fully capable of going full-stack when needed. If you've ever wanted to shape a product and company from the ground up, this is that seat.
What You'll Do
Must-haves:
We're an early-stage, fast-growing enterprise AI platform (agentic operating system for businesses) that has achieved strong product-market fit and is growing revenue rapidly. Backed by Y Combinator and prominent angel investors from the AI and SaaS world, we have thousands of AI agents deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies today.
This is a founding engineer role — you'll operate at near-CTO level, taking vague problems all the way to shipped product with no hand-holding. You'll be backend-heavy and AI-native, but fully capable of going full-stack when needed. If you've ever wanted to shape a product and company from the ground up, this is that seat.
What You'll Do
- Own large product areas end-to-end — from user insight through to production
- Build and continuously improve our agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability
- Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures
- Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that actually solve problems
- Ship full-stack when needed: Go backend, React Vite (TypeScript) frontend
- Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and ruthless self-scaling
- Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase
- Design and work with APIs (REST and/or gRPC) in microservices architectures
- Own CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production observability
Must-haves:
- Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang) — this is a dealbreaker
- Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
- Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and production monitoring/observability
- Experience building and consuming APIs (REST and/or gRPC) in microservices environments
- 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Prior experience with AI infrastructure, prompt engineering, model deployment, or agent orchestration
- Experience designing and shipping AI-driven products; familiarity with agentic AI systems, LLMs, or AI agents
- Previous startup experience or a founding/early engineer background
- Experience with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL, with solid understanding of data storage trade-offs
- AI research background or experience at an AI tooling/coding startup
- Former founder — or someone who has built something meaningful from scratch (startup, side project, shipped feature)
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- Are a sharp, autonomous problem-solver who doesn't need a PM to decide what to build
- Have deep product sense and build for users, not for code's sake
- Are obsessed with using and building AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)
- Love clean, maintainable Go and hold high standards in code review
- Thrive in ambiguity and move fast without sacrificing quality
- Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually, reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role
- Equity: Generous equity package commensurate with a founding-level position
- Unlimited AI tooling budget — we practice what we preach
- A seat at the table: you will shape the product and the company's direction
- On-site in San Francisco, CA
- Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must be authorized to work in the United States
Salary : $120,000 - $250,000