Why This Role Stands Out
As a Founding Engineer at Clera, you'll shape the future of AI-driven fintech by tackling complex technical challenges and building an autonomous deal-making system from the ground up. This role is perfect for experienced engineers passionate about applied AI and building robust, end-to-end systems, offering unparalleled growth and impact within a reputable startup. Don't miss this chance to be an integral part of an exceptional early team and define the engineering landscape.
Quick Overview
Job Description
About the Role
This is a founding engineer role at an AI-native fintech startup building an autonomous system that understands businesses, finds buyers, structures financing, and manages deals end-to-end. You will own the most critical technical challenges at any given time and help shape the institution from first principles alongside an exceptional early team.
What You'll Do
Help select and shape the early technical team, setting standards for how the engineering organization operates.
Build intelligence that models businesses, reconciles contradictory evidence, and reasons about how decisions propagate through companies and markets.
Design and ship agents that coordinate months of complex financial work across hundreds of counterparties, preserving context, commitments, and dependencies as conditions evolve.
Own end-to-end architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and product interfaces for production AI systems.
Move from ambiguous, high-stakes problems to working, reliable products across backend systems, applied AI, and user-facing interfaces.
What We're Looking For
8+ years of experience shipping production-grade systems and owning critical technical decisions.
Deep hands-on expertise in applied AI, particularly building intelligent agents for complex, multi-party workflows.
Full-stack AI engineering background spanning backend systems, AI components, and product interfaces.
Experience with retrieval, memory systems, and evaluation frameworks in data-intensive environments.
Track record building AI models for business-process automation, evidence reconciliation, or decision propagation.
Experience owning greenfield or first-principles architecture for complex AI systems.
Background in financial services, document intelligence, or other complex professional workflows is a strong plus.
Experience at AI/ML document-intelligence or fintech research-tooling companies is a plus.
Strong drive for ownership, craftsmanship, and measuring whether systems actually work in the real world.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $180,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Equity offered. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.
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