Jobs · Engineering · California

Founding AI Engineer

Clera · San Francisco, CA · 1 wk ago
On-siteEngineering$150k–$200k/yrFull-time

About The Role

Join the core team of an early-stage consumer social startup redefining how young people make friends in real life. The company runs AI-powered small group hangouts every week, matching people into compatible groups and handling everything end-to-end — onboarding, profiling, matching, logistics, reminders, and follow-ups — through a suite of AI agents. Thousands of users connect every month, and the platform is rapidly expanding across university campuses across the US.

What You'll Do

  • AI Matching & Social Graphs
    • Build a novel social graph grounded in real-world interaction data, processing millions of data points
    • Design and improve matching systems that group users into highly compatible cohorts
    • Develop collaborative filtering, graph embeddings, and ranking systems
    • Apply reinforcement learning from real-world outcomes to continuously improve personalization
    • Discover patterns and signals that lead to meaningful, lasting friendships
  • Communication Workflows & AI Agent Orchestration
    • Design and build agent experiences across channels where users already are (Instagram, iMessage, WhatsApp, TikTok)
    • Orchestrate a multi-agent system handling the full user lifecycle from onboarding to follow-up
    • Integrate third-party APIs and messaging services into reliable, scalable workflows
    • Contribute to human-AI interaction design to make agent experiences feel natural and effortless

Required

  • Hands-on experience building AI/ML systems in production (0–4+ years), ideally in recommender systems, matching, or social graph domains
  • Experience processing and modeling at scale (millions of data points)
  • Proficiency in collaborative filtering, graph embeddings, and ranking systems
  • Experience with reinforcement learning applied to real-world personalization
  • Familiarity with multi-channel messaging APIs and AI agent frameworks
  • Ability to design scalable infrastructure supporting complex AI workloads
  • Strong cross-functional communication skills; comfortable working alongside product, design, and data science
  • Founding mindset: you ship fast, own problems end-to-end, and thrive in ambiguity

Note

Candidates must be eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually
Significant founding equity
Opportunity to shape the technical direction of a fast-growing consumer AI company

Location

This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, California. The team works in-person together.

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