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Founding Engineer

CleraSan Francisco🇺🇸United StatesPosted 11 Sept 2026

Why This Role Stands Out

As the Founding Engineer at Clera, you'll have an unparalleled opportunity to shape the future of AI tooling, owning the end-to-end development cycle and directly impacting customer success. This role is perfect for a driven engineer with full-stack TypeScript expertise and a passion for building impactful solutions from the ground up, offering significant influence and growth potential in an early-stage startup environment. Apply now to be a foundational member of an innovative team and leave your mark on a rapidly evolving field.

Quick Overview

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

Job Description

About the Role

This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI startup building tooling that reads agent conversations, surfaces failures, and automatically opens patches for customers to merge. You will own the entire loop, from event ingestion and failure detection through patch generation, verification, and the review UI that customers trust with their repos.

What You'll Do

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

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

  • Move directly from customer conversation to shipped solution without waiting for formal specs or sign-off.

  • Talk to customers directly, read their traces, and diagnose what broke before anyone else does.

  • Make lasting architectural calls on schema design, service boundaries, and speed-versus-correctness tradeoffs.

  • Set 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 track record of working effectively outside a single specialty.

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

  • Real comfort with data at volume: you think in cost-per-event and optimize accordingly.

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

  • Experience designing and optimizing high-volume event data pipelines with cost awareness.

  • Strong product sense: able to take rough, ambiguous problems and return well-considered solutions independently.

  • Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems.

  • Comfortable making architectural decisions that shape long-term system design.

  • Bonus: experience with PR review automation or code quality tooling, and prior early-stage startup experience.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California (six days per week).

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