Founding Engineer
$120k - $250kClera
Job Description
Job Description
About the Role
This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup building an agentic operating system that enables businesses to deploy and orchestrate AI agents at scale. You'll operate with CTO-level ownership — taking vague problems from user insight all the way to production — and play a direct hand in shaping both the product and the company. The role matters because the systems you build will power how enterprises automate complex, real-world workflows.
What You'll DoOwn large product areas end-to-end, from user research and scoping through to production deployment.
Build and continuously improve agentic systems, making them more accurate, reliable, and powerful.
Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and multi-agent architectures.
Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems.
Ship full-stack when needed across a Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend.
Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and relentless self-scaling.
Review code quickly and maintain high standards across the codebase.
Demonstrated ability to own features end-to-end with minimal hand-holding, from ideation to production.
Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems — agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use.
Strong track record of production readiness: monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability.
Deep product sense with a history of building for user outcomes, not just clean code.
Proficiency in Go and care for clean, maintainable backend code; comfort going full-stack when needed.
Experience with modern AI development tooling (e.g., LLM-assisted coding, coding agents, AI-native workflows).
Thrives in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build next.
Prior experience building something from scratch (startup, founding role, or significant side project) is a strong plus.
US work authorization required — visa sponsorship is not available.
Base salary $120,000–$250,000 USD annually , plus generous equity reflecting the founding-level impact of the role. Unlimited AI tooling budget included.
LocationOn-site in San Francisco, California, USA .
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