Clera

Head of Engineering

San Francisco
Salary
$180,000 - $220,000 annually
Level
Lead
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Not offered

Open. First seen 6 November 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

A seed-stage neurotechnology startup in San Francisco is hiring a Head of Engineering — a founding leadership role for someone who can set technical direction and still ship code every day. You'll partner directly with the Founder to define product strategy, own the full engineering stack, and build the team and culture from the ground up. This is a rare opportunity to be the senior technical voice at a company pioneering software-only approaches to cognitive health and performance.

What You'll Do

  • Partner directly with the Founder to define and evolve technical strategy and product roadmap
  • Stay deeply hands-on: write and review code, make architecture calls, and set the bar for engineering quality
  • Own and harden backend infrastructure for security and scale
  • Establish engineering workflows, principles, and code quality standards the team can grow into
  • Lead technical hiring and build engineering culture from the ground up
  • Work cross-functionally with product, science, and design to ship quickly and iterate based on real user feedback
  • Translate fuzzy product goals into clean technical decisions, including through user research and experiment design

What We're Looking For

Required

  • 2–6 years of experience in fast-moving startup environments, preferably in consumer software or AI-native products
  • Former founder or founding engineer with proven experience shipping a consumer product from 0→1
  • Hands-on individual contributor comfortable owning end-to-end engineering as the senior technical voice
  • Experience with voice/audio processing and building software products around voice data
  • Proficiency in Swift/macOS desktop, iOS, and Python for ML/data pipelines, plus cloud backend (AWS or GCP)
  • Strong product instincts — comfortable with ambiguity, user research, metric analysis, and experiment design
  • Eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

Nice to Have

  • Native mobile development (iOS/Android), or managing teams who do
  • Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, agentic systems, or LLM-based products
  • Background in consumer health or wellness technology

The ideal candidate is high energy, low ego, and deeply mission-driven — equally comfortable in a product strategy conversation and a code review, and energized by the challenge of building something genuinely new.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Base salary: $180,000 – $220,000 USD annually
  • Meaningful equity package
  • Full benefits
  • Flexible PTO

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be willing and able to work from the San Francisco office. Visa sponsorship is not available.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

Android · GCP · RAG · Swift · iOS

Rare in Clera's other 299 open postings.

Compared with Clera's other open jobs.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 358 open in Engineering. 226 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

LLM (180 of 358), TypeScript (177 of 358), React (154 of 358), Python (146 of 358), Machine Learning (74 of 358), Supabase (73 of 358), PostgreSQL (68 of 358)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

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

Other openings for this role

2 open postings for this role in San Francisco, first posted 9 September 2026. The company is likely hiring for more than one position. None has been taken down and posted again.

Salary context

29 other open postings titled Head of Engineering state a salary: median USD 225,000 to USD 300,000 a year.

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