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Founding Engineer (AI/ML)

CleraSan Francisco🇺🇸United StatesPosted 14 Sept 2026

Why This Role Stands Out

As a Founding Engineer (AI/ML) at Clera, you'll have the opportunity to shape the core intelligence layer of an innovative AI recruiting marketplace, directly impacting product evolution and enjoying significant visibility. This role is ideal for experienced engineers with a passion for building end-to-end ML systems and LLM-powered features, offering immense growth potential within a dynamic startup environment. Apply today to be at the forefront of AI in recruitment!

Quick Overview

Seniority
Mid Senior
Employment type
Full Time
Location
San Francisco, United States
Posted
Yesterday
SupabaseLLMPrismaPyTorchPythonReactTensorFlowTypeScript

Job Description

About the Role

This is a founding-team engineering role at an early-stage AI recruiting marketplace, where you will own the intelligence layer end to end. Recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, and LLM-powered matching are the core of how the product works, and this role is responsible for building and evolving all of it. The impact is immediate and highly visible across the entire product.

What You'll Do

  • Own the AI/ML intelligence layer end to end, covering recommendation, ranking, and retrieval.

  • Build and iterate on LLM-powered matching that measurably improves candidate-to-role alignment.

  • Take features from problem definition to production independently, shipping on a daily cadence.

  • Architect and maintain the production data pipelines and services that models run on.

  • Work directly with the founding team to translate product goals into shipped systems.

What We're Looking For

  • 2 to 5 years of production software engineering experience, with genuine applied ML depth.

  • Hands-on experience building recommender systems, ranking algorithms, or ML-powered matching in production. This is the most important requirement.

  • Production experience with LLM APIs and shipping LLM-powered features to real users.

  • Strong proficiency in TypeScript or Python; either language is sufficient on its own.

  • Experience with production ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, or equivalent.

  • Experience building and maintaining production data pipelines and services.

  • Comfortable in fast-paced, unstructured startup environments with rapid iteration cycles.

  • Existing U.S. work authorization, or eligibility for the sponsorship route currently available.

  • Strong CS fundamentals and a track record that demonstrates exceptional technical achievement, such as notable open-source contributions or standout personal projects.

  • Nice to have: React, Supabase, Prisma, Typesense, vector search and embeddings, or workflow automation tooling in production.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $130,000 to $170,000 annually, plus competitive founding-hire equity. Visa sponsorship is available for eligible candidates.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, 6 days per week. This is an in-person role at a shared hacker house setup. Relocation assistance is available for candidates based outside the Bay Area.

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