# Founding Engineer - Company: [Clera]() - Location: London - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Posted: September 9, 2026 ## Job description ### About the Role This is a founding engineering role at a seed-stage AI infrastructure startup building a production-grade LLM gateway that sits at the core of AI-first products. You will work directly with the founders to shape the technical direction and architecture of the platform, making a tangible impact from day one. If you want to leave a real mark on a fast-growing company, or are building toward founding your own startup someday, this role is a rare opportunity to do meaningful work at the ground floor. ### What You'll Do * Design and build backend services that power an LLM routing and observability platform serving production AI workloads. * Own architectural decisions across a pragmatic microservices stack, balancing scalability with the practical needs of an early-stage product. * Contribute to the core gateway service written in Go, as well as auxiliary and ML/AI services in Python. * Select and apply the right database and caching technologies for each problem, across SQL databases and distributed caches. * Work within and evolve a Kubernetes-based infrastructure, redefining the stack as the product grows. * Collaborate closely with the founding team to translate product goals into robust, efficient engineering solutions. ### What We're Looking For * 5 or more years of experience building backend services in a compiled language, with strong preference for Go. * Solid, practical understanding of concurrency and demonstrated experience applying it in production systems. * Hands-on experience selecting and using different database and caching technologies appropriately. * Ability to design architectures that are both scalable and pragmatic, calibrated to where a product actually is. * Strong judgment around tradeoffs between quality, speed, and completeness when building minimal but correct products. * A track record of independently picking up new technologies and running with them. * Experience with Kubernetes is a strong plus. * Background in AI or LLM infrastructure, or developer tooling, is a plus. ### Compensation & Benefits Competitive total compensation package with significant equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. ### Location On-site in London, England, United Kingdom. ## Apply [Apply on Clera]() Canonical job page: