Founding Engineer
$150k - $200kClera
About the Role
This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI/ML startup building tools that automatically detect failures in agent conversations and generate the patches to fix them. You'll own the entire loop — from data ingestion through patch generation and verification — and set the engineering culture everyone who comes after you will inherit.
What You'll Do
Ship end-to-end: take problems from failure detection through ingest, patch generation, and verification into a product customers actively use.
Own the trust surface — reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories.
Move from customer conversation to shipped solution without waiting for formal specs or sign-off.
Work directly with customers: read their traces, join their channels, and surface what broke before anyone else does.
Make architectural calls that last — schema design, service boundaries, and speed-vs-correctness tradeoffs.
Define engineering culture from scratch: testing standards, on-call practices, and ship criteria.
Work across the full system — some weeks detection quality, some weeks the ingest pipeline, some weeks the review UI.
What We're Looking For
3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated track record of working effectively outside your core specialty.
Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, from frontend through core services — it's the entire codebase.
Real comfort with high-volume data: you think in cost-per-event, not just correctness.
Experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail.
Experience designing data pipelines and optimizing systems for scale and cost awareness.
Ability to take ambiguous customer problems and return well-considered solutions independently.
Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems.
Strong product sense — comfortable making architectural decisions with long-term system impact.
Bonus: experience with PR review automation, code quality tooling, or early-stage founding team environments.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.
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