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Founding Engineer - Infrastructure

$175k - $300k
Full-time

Clera

About the Role

This is the first infrastructure hire at a seed-stage agentic integration platform, working directly with the CTO on a clear leadership track. You will own the full infra and platform layer from day one, setting the foundation that every future infrastructure hire builds on. The role sits at the intersection of cloud platform engineering, agent infrastructure, and self-hosted product delivery.

What You'll Do

  • Design and operate a durable-execution, sandboxed integration runtime, roughly analogous to a mini cloud platform for integration workloads.

  • Build and scale the agent infrastructure that runs coding agents writing, testing, and deploying integration code in production.

  • Own the full observability pipeline across logs, metrics, and tracing for every integration and agent.

  • Ship a self-hostable, single-tenant deployment of the platform as a first-class product.

  • Set engineering patterns and standards across the infrastructure domain.

  • Help hire and, within roughly a year, grow into leading the team that owns this domain.

  • Work as a peer to the founding team and ship to production continuously.

What We're Looking For

  • 3 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, ideally spanning the full range of infra ownership rather than contribution only.

  • Strong CS fundamentals from a rigorous technical degree program.

  • Background at a high-growth, venture-backed startup, either as a founder or as an early engineer; experience in fast, ambiguous, under-resourced environments is essential.

  • Hands-on Kubernetes experience: you have operated, scaled, and debugged it in production.

  • End-to-end ownership of cloud infrastructure or a platform product, not just a supporting contributor role.

  • Cloud infrastructure focus rather than a background centered primarily on data infrastructure.

  • Proficiency with observability design across logs, metrics, and tracing for production systems.

  • Comfort with the modern AI-assisted engineering workflow while maintaining rigorous production-quality judgment.

  • Experience building self-hostable, single-tenant product deployments is a plus.

  • Familiarity with TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Docker is relevant to the stack.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary range: $175,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available where an O-1 visa is a realistic path.

Location

On-site, five days a week in San Francisco, CA, USA. Candidates based elsewhere in the US are welcome with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco.

Vacancy posted 4 days ago
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