What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Product Engineer position at Clera?
About The Role
We're a small, fast-moving team building an AI-driven pricing and monetization platform that helps B2B companies continuously optimize their pricing strategy — from packaging and willingness-to-pay analysis to deal quoting, discount governance, and CPQ workflows. We're looking for a Founding Product Engineer to own entire product modules end-to-end, work directly with customers, and help set the technical and engineering culture of the company.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the founding-team level. You'll collaborate closely with customers, product, and leadership — and be expected to take ambiguous problems all the way to shipped, production-quality features. Financial logic correctness, AI-native tooling, and clean API design are first-class priorities here.
What You'll Do
Required
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote or fully distributed arrangements are not available for this position.
We're a small, fast-moving team building an AI-driven pricing and monetization platform that helps B2B companies continuously optimize their pricing strategy — from packaging and willingness-to-pay analysis to deal quoting, discount governance, and CPQ workflows. We're looking for a Founding Product Engineer to own entire product modules end-to-end, work directly with customers, and help set the technical and engineering culture of the company.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the founding-team level. You'll collaborate closely with customers, product, and leadership — and be expected to take ambiguous problems all the way to shipped, production-quality features. Financial logic correctness, AI-native tooling, and clean API design are first-class priorities here.
What You'll Do
- Own whole product modules end-to-end: scope with customers, design versioned APIs, build the UI, ship, and iterate.
- Design and evolve architecture for agentic AI systems spanning Slack bots, terminal UIs, web interfaces, and vendor integrations.
- Ensure product features are drivable by LLM agents via MCP/FastMCP servers and conversational interfaces.
- Move pricing and business logic off the client into backend services to preserve financial fidelity.
- Extend and maintain a typed pricing ontology (Pydantic models for SKUs, propositions, personas, pricing structures, etc.).
- Lead technical discussions and architectural reviews to keep systems robust, extensible, and secure.
- Establish testing, observability, deployment, and performance monitoring practices for AI-driven features.
- Mentor peers, influence product strategy, and shape engineering culture and best practices.
- Treat money-handling code as load-bearing infrastructure; prioritize root-cause analysis for production issues.
- Adopt and improve an AI-native SDLC where agents assist with code and automated review gates.
Required
- 8 years of engineering experience with strong full-stack skills and proven ownership of product areas at startup or staff engineer scope.
- Deep backend expertise — experience with FastAPI, Python, and MongoDB or a comparable modern stack.
- Credible frontend skills with React and TypeScript; able to ship a clean, polished UI independently.
- Track record of taking ambiguous customer problems to shipped features without a dedicated PM.
- Experience designing and building REST or GraphQL APIs with clear contracts and versioning.
- High standards for correctness, especially around financial or pricing logic.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the US — no visa sponsorship is available.
- Interest or hands-on experience in B2B monetization: pricing models, packaging, quoting, billing, or CPQ.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Cursor, Copilot) and experience integrating LLM agent tooling or MCP-like servers.
- Prior experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup.
- Salary: $200,000 – $250,000 USD annually
- Early-employee equity commensurate with founding-team scope
- Opportunity to shape product, architecture, and engineering culture from the ground up
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote or fully distributed arrangements are not available for this position.
Salary : $200,000 - $250,000