Founding Engineer
Clera · San Francisco, CA · Today
On-siteEngineering$150k–$250k/yrFull-time
About The Role
We're a seed-stage startup building an agentic integration platform used by paying enterprise customers. As our first engineering hire, you'll own core systems end-to-end and set the engineering patterns that every future hire builds on. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders — we want your opinion, not just your code — and ship production-ready systems from day one. This is a rare opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a company at its earliest stage, in one of the most exciting areas of software: AI agents and workflow automation.
What You'll Do
- Own the agent platform, infrastructure, and integrations runtime end-to-end
- Define and establish the engineering patterns, standards, and architecture that every future engineer builds on
- Collaborate directly with the founders, contributing strong technical opinions and leadership
- Ship to production constantly, delivering reliable, observable, and scalable systems
Must-Haves
- 3+ years of software engineering experience in fast-paced environments; startup experience strongly preferred
- Proficiency in TypeScript and React for frontend, and Node.js for backend development
- Demonstrated ability to build something 0 to 1 — whether at an early-stage startup or through a serious side project
- Experience integrating or building workflows around large language models (LLMs) and agent-based platforms
- Experience owning end-to-end feature development across frontend, backend, and infrastructure with measurable customer impact
- Solid understanding of observability, monitoring, tracing, and reliable retry/queuing patterns in distributed systems
- Hands-on experience with AWS for cloud infrastructure and PostgreSQL for data storage
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with Bun, Effect-TS, or Kubernetes
- Background at a high-growth product company or enterprise SaaS environment
Compensation & Benefits
- Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience
- Equity participation as the first engineering hire
- Visa sponsorship available
Location
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. We work together in person — it's important to us at this stage of the company.