Founding Engineer

Clera•San Francisco, CA

10d•$120,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

A YC-backed enterprise AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their small, high-output team in San Francisco. The company is building an agentic operating system for the enterprise, with thousands of agents already deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies. They have strong product-market fit and are growing revenue rapidly month-over-month. This is a founding-level role with CTO-level expectations. You'll take vague problems, scope them, build them end-to-end, and ship things that create real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You need to be a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer rolled into one. Former founders are especially encouraged to apply.

Requirements

Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang)
Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship
Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript
Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production monitoring/observability
Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures
0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

Nice To Haves

Prior startup experience or time as a founding/early engineer
Experience building AI-driven products — agentic systems, LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience with relational (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL databases
AI research background or experience at an AI coding or tooling startup
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
Have razor-sharp problem-solving instincts and move fast without sacrificing quality
Love Go and care about clean, maintainable code
Are obsessed with AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)
Thrive in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build
Have built something from scratch before: a startup, a side project, or a feature that shipped and mattered

Responsibilities

Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight all the way to production
Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability
Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, agent architectures
Talk to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems
Ship full-stack when needed (Go backend, Vite + React + TypeScript frontend)
Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and self-scaling workflows
Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase