Clera

Staff Engineer, Agentic AI

San Francisco
Salary
$160,000 - $250,000 annually
Level
Staff
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Not offered

Open. First seen 27 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

Lead the development of agent intelligence that helps engineers complete complex workflows across desktop engineering software. You will be a hands-on technical lead for a small AI team, partnering with user research and domain experts to deliver reliable, cost-efficient capabilities grounded in real engineering workflows.

What You'll Do

  • Own agent architecture for tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.
  • Define and improve task success metrics, establishing baselines and tracking workflow completion, cost, and failure modes.
  • Build rigorous, reproducible evaluation infrastructure that translates validated user stories into test cases.
  • Work with researchers, domain experts, and engineers to map user workflows and prioritize valuable agent capabilities.
  • Set per-task token budgets and measure cost per completed workflow.
  • Lead a small team through technical direction, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on implementation.
  • Collaborate with product, integrations, and customers to align agent behavior with real-world use.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including 2 or more years building LLM agents that take real-world actions.
  • Deep knowledge of LLM application architecture, including model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration.
  • Experience creating agent evaluation and benchmarking frameworks for task completion, cost efficiency, and failure analysis.
  • Strong Python skills and familiarity with function calling, tool APIs, observability or tracing, and evaluation tools.
  • Hands-on technical leadership experience guiding a small engineering team while continuing to write production code.
  • Experience shipping AI or LLM tools over proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software.
  • Experience with desktop automation or application APIs, such as COM, and familiarity with enterprise workstation constraints.
  • Background in mechanical engineering software, CAD/CAE, PLM, or a related engineering domain.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $160,000 to $250,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.

What this role asks for

Standard for software engineering roles

Python

Common in software engineering postings at any company.

Compared with Clera's other open jobs.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 421 open in Engineering. 355 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in March: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Python (185 of 421), LLM (178 of 421), TypeScript (162 of 421), React (132 of 421), Machine Learning (109 of 421), PostgreSQL (76 of 421), JavaScript (70 of 421)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Clera's own job board.

Other openings for this role

5 postings for this role in San Francisco since 29 September 2026, 4 still open. None has been taken down and posted again.

Salary context

7 other open postings titled Staff Engineer, Agentic AI state a salary: median USD 160,000 to USD 250,000 a year.

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