Founding Engineer

Clera • San Francisco, CA

4d • $160,000 - $270,000 • Onsite

About The Position

A seed-stage AI infrastructure company is hiring 2–3 Founding Engineers to work on the core of a graph-native context and memory platform purpose-built for AI agents. This is not a feature factory role. You will own significant, high-impact pieces of the platform — query engine, storage layer, graph internals — and make architecture decisions that will shape the product for the next decade. You will work directly with the founding team, and your name will be on the design docs and the pull requests in the same week.
The company builds a GraphDB on object storage with semantic search, git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution — giving AI agents persistent, structured, and temporally aware context. Backed by prominent investors and researchers in the AI space, the team is small, high-conviction, and building foundational infrastructure that real AI agents depend on in production.

Requirements

• 3+ years of systems programming and distributed systems development
• Proficiency in Rust and/or Go at a production level
• Experience designing and implementing core infrastructure components such as query execution engines, storage layers, or graph internals
• Proven track record of architectural decision-making — you've written design docs and shipped the code in the same sprint
• Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook; experience in small, high-ownership founding or early-stage teams
• Strong CS fundamentals: you reason from first principles, not just frameworks

Nice To Haves

• Experience building or scaling distributed databases, storage infrastructure, or graph systems
• Open source contributions in systems-level projects
• Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role
• Recurse Center background or equivalent self-directed deep technical learning

Responsibilities

• Own and ship core infrastructure: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems components
• Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team
• Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category
• Participate in architecture reviews and make hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences
• Help raise the technical ceiling as the team grows — influencing roadmap, hiring bar, and engineering culture

Benefits

• Meaningful early-stage equity — the team is committed to builders owning a real piece of what they create
• Learning budget: books, courses, conferences, and compute for personal experiments
• Wellness programs and top-tier hardware & software
• Free daily meals in the office
• Flexible PTO focused on enabling deep work
• Periodic team offsites

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed