Skip to content

Clera

Founding Engineer

Compensation
$150K–$200K / yr
From job posting
Location
San Francisco, CA, US
Arrangement
On-site
Employment type
Full-time
Posted
26 September 2026 (5 days ago)

Checked 5 days agoApplications go to the employer, never to RoleSprint

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI developer tooling startup. You will own the entire loop from ingesting agent conversation data through automated patch generation and verification, building the infrastructure that helps engineering teams catch and fix failures their existing processes miss. The work you do here sets the technical and cultural standards for every engineer who follows.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Ship end-to-end features spanning ingest pipelines, detection systems, patch generation, verification, and the user-facing product.

- Own the trust surface, including reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories.

- Move from customer problem to shipped solution independently, without waiting for formal specs or sign-off.

- Engage directly with customers: read their traces, join their communication channels, and surface issues proactively.

- Make lasting architectural decisions covering schema design, service boundaries, and speed-versus-correctness tradeoffs.

- Define engineering culture from the ground up, including testing standards, on-call practices, and release criteria.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- 3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated ability to work effectively outside a single specialty.

- Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, from frontend through core services (the entire codebase is TypeScript).

- Real comfort working with high-volume event data, with cost-per-event thinking alongside correctness.

- Experience designing and optimizing data pipelines and production systems with observability and monitoring in mind.

- Hands-on experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail.

- Strong product sense: able to take rough, open-ended problems and return well-considered solutions without designs handed to you.

- Experience making architectural decisions that shape long-term system design.

- Comfortable working directly with customers to understand production failures and requirements.

- Bonus: experience with PR review automation, code quality tooling, or early-stage founding team environments.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Equity is expected given the founding-team-adjacent seniority of the role.

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, California. This role requires working from the office six days per week.

Work location

  • San Francisco, CA, US

Related jobs

Ready to make a decision?

This role is either worth your time or it isn’t.

Analyze the posting against your experience, see the gaps clearly, and build the right materials only if the opportunity makes sense.

Nothing is submitted automatically. You choose what happens next.

About this listing

Published on Ashby under the board identifier Clera, which is the name the employer’s own job board carries. RoleSprint has not verified the company’s registered or trading name, so it is shown exactly as published rather than tidied up.

RoleSprint is not the employer and not a recruiter. Applications are made on the employer’s own site and never reach us; what RoleSprint does is help you decide whether a role is worth your time and prepare for it if it is.

Published 26 September 2026, last checked 5 days ago. A posting stops being advertised here 90 days after the employer published it, and one the employer takes down is marked closed rather than quietly removed.

More searches like this one

Browse all current openings

No credit card requiredStart free