Founding Engineer

Clera•San Francisco, CA

13d•$150,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

A seed-stage AI data infrastructure startup in San Francisco is looking for a Founding Engineer with 1+ years of professional experience shipping to production. This is a foundational hire at an early-stage company building a people-data and agent platform — you'll have real ownership, work directly with leadership, and help shape the technical direction of the product as it scales toward Series A. Ideal for a high-agency, first-principles thinker who thrives in ambiguity and has founder aspirations.

Requirements

1+ years of professional experience shipping software to production.
Hands-on experience with APIs, distributed systems, microservices, and data pipelines.
Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP) and Linux server environments.
Strong instincts for performance, reliability, and cost-efficient system design.
High agency — you move fast, take ownership, and operate well with limited direction.
First-principles thinker who is energized by building 0-to-1 in a fast-moving environment.

Nice To Haves

Comfort working with LLMs, AI agents, and knowledge graph or identity resolution systems is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate core infrastructure powering a people-data and AI agent platform, including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture.
Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a strong focus on performance, cost efficiency, and reliability across cloud and Linux server environments.
Own projects end-to-end — from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration — shipping quickly without sacrificing system integrity.
Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices that will define the company's long-term direction.
Contribute broadly across the stack, including developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test platform APIs.