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Founding Engineer

Clera
Posted a day ago, valid for a month
Location

San Francisco, CA, US

Salary

$120,000 - $250,000 per year

Contract type

Full Time

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Sonic Summary

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  • This founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup involves building an agentic operating system for deploying AI agents at scale.
  • Candidates should have hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems, with a strong focus on production readiness and user outcomes.
  • The position requires proficiency in Go and the ability to work full-stack, as well as a proven track record of owning features from ideation to production.
  • The base salary for this role ranges from $120,000 to $250,000 USD annually, accompanied by generous equity options.
  • Applicants must have prior experience in a startup or founding role and US work authorization, as visa sponsorship is not available.

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup building an agentic operating system that enables businesses to deploy and orchestrate AI agents at scale. You'll operate with CTO-level ownership — taking vague problems from user insight all the way to production — and play a direct hand in shaping both the product and the company. The role matters because the systems you build will power how enterprises automate complex, real-world workflows.

What You'll Do

  • Own large product areas end-to-end, from user research and scoping through to production deployment.

  • Build and continuously improve agentic systems, making them more accurate, reliable, and powerful.

  • Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and multi-agent architectures.

  • Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems.

  • Ship full-stack when needed across a Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend.

  • Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and relentless self-scaling.

  • Review code quickly and maintain high standards across the codebase.

What We're Looking For

  • Demonstrated ability to own features end-to-end with minimal hand-holding, from ideation to production.

  • Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems — agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use.

  • Strong track record of production readiness: monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability.

  • Deep product sense with a history of building for user outcomes, not just clean code.

  • Proficiency in Go and care for clean, maintainable backend code; comfort going full-stack when needed.

  • Experience with modern AI development tooling (e.g., LLM-assisted coding, coding agents, AI-native workflows).

  • Thrives in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build next.

  • Prior experience building something from scratch (startup, founding role, or significant side project) is a strong plus.

  • US work authorization required — visa sponsorship is not available.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary $120,000–$250,000 USD annually, plus generous equity reflecting the founding-level impact of the role. Unlimited AI tooling budget included.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, USA.




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