Founding Engineer - Full Stack

Clera•San Francisco, CA

6d•$150,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

A Y Combinator-backed AI startup is looking for a Founding Engineer – Full Stack to join a small founding team at the ground floor. The company operates at the intersection of AI research, product, and engineering — building tools that help brands understand and shape how large language models perceive and represent them. This is a rare opportunity to co-define engineering culture and practices from day one in a fast-moving, high-impact environment.

Requirements

1+ years of experience on engineering teams (2+ preferred), including at least one stint longer than 18 months in a strong startup or scale-up environment.
Full-stack proficiency — comfortable owning customer-facing UI through to infrastructure.
Hands-on experience with React, Python, Terraform, and AWS.
Experience building agentic systems or working with LLMs in production.
Strong product sense and design instincts; able to translate customer needs into shippable features.
Startup experience or self-driven personal projects that demonstrate initiative and high agency.
Must be a US citizen or have US work authorization (no visa sponsorship for candidates outside the US).

Nice To Haves

Scientific or academic research background.
Direct customer-facing experience in a technical role.
Enthusiasm for adopting AI-powered coding and productivity tools.

Responsibilities

Own problems end-to-end — from customer insight and product requirements all the way through research and infrastructure.
Maintain a tight feedback loop with customers and the founding team; ship features quickly and iteratively.
Help define and shape the engineering team's culture, patterns, and best practices.
Continuously explore and reinvent how engineering teams work effectively alongside AI agents.