Clera

Founding Engineer

San Francisco
Salary
$120,000 - $250,000 annually
Level
Junior
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 YC-backed enterprise AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their small, high-output team in San Francisco. The company is building an agentic operating system for the enterprise, with thousands of agents already deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies. They have strong product-market fit and are growing revenue rapidly month-over-month.

This is a founding-level role with CTO-level expectations. You'll take vague problems, scope them, build them end-to-end, and ship things that create real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You need to be a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer rolled into one. Former founders are especially encouraged to apply.

What You'll Do

  • Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight all the way to production
  • Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability
  • Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, agent architectures
  • Talk to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems
  • Ship full-stack when needed (Go backend, Vite + React + TypeScript frontend)
  • Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and self-scaling workflows
  • Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase

What We're Looking For

Must-haves (dealbreakers):

  • Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang)
  • Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

Required skills:

  • Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript
  • Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production monitoring/observability
  • Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures
  • 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

Strong pluses:

  • Prior startup experience or time as a founding/early engineer
  • Experience building AI-driven products — agentic systems, LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Experience with relational (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL databases
  • AI research background or experience at an AI coding or tooling startup
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

You'll thrive here if you:

  • Have razor-sharp problem-solving instincts and move fast without sacrificing quality
  • Love Go and care about clean, maintainable code
  • Are obsessed with AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)
  • Thrive in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build
  • Have built something from scratch before: a startup, a side project, or a feature that shipped and mattered

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually
  • Generous equity reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role
  • Unlimited AI tooling budget
  • A true seat at the table — you'll shape the product and the company's direction

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 357 open in Engineering. 225 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 (181 of 357), TypeScript (179 of 357), React (155 of 357), Python (150 of 357), Machine Learning (75 of 357), Supabase (73 of 357), PostgreSQL (69 of 357)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

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

Posting history

Reposted 7 times since 9 September 2026: a posting for this role in San Francisco was taken down and the role was posted again.

Salary context

67 other open postings titled Founding Engineer state a salary: median USD 160,000 to USD 250,000 a year.

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