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 lets businesses deploy and orchestrate AI agents at scale. You'll operate at near-CTO level — owning large surface areas of the product, shaping architecture, and working directly with users to solve real problems. The impact here is outsized and the role is integral to how the company grows.
What You'll DoOwn product features end-to-end, from user insight through scoping, building, and shipping to production.
Design, build, and improve agentic systems — increasing their accuracy, reliability, and power.
Work at the frontier of AI engineering: context engineering, tool use, and multi-agent architectures.
Talk directly to users, deeply understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems.
Build full-stack when needed across a Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend.
Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and developer productivity tooling.
Review code quickly and maintain high engineering standards across the codebase.
3–10+ years of software engineering experience, backend-heavy with full-stack versatility.
Strong proficiency in Go ; clean, maintainable code is a point of pride for you.
Hands-on experience building and deploying AI-driven or agentic systems in production environments.
Familiarity with agent architectures, context engineering, tool use, and multi-model AI integrations.
Experience ensuring production readiness: monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability.
Deep product sense — you build for user outcomes, not for the sake of code.
Comfort with ambiguity; you scope and execute without waiting for detailed specs.
Experience shipping something from scratch — a startup, a side project, or a greenfield feature.
Active user of modern AI coding tools (e.g. AI-assisted coding environments, coding agents).
US work authorization required; visa sponsorship is not available.
Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually
Generous equity commensurate with a founding-level role
Visa sponsorship: not available
On-site in San Francisco, California, USA .
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