# Founding Engineer - Company: [Clera]() - Location: San Francisco - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Salary: $150K – $200K - Posted: August 26, 2026 ## Job description ### About the Role This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI/ML startup building tools that automatically detect failures in agent conversations and generate the patches to fix them. You'll own the entire loop — from data ingestion through patch generation and verification — and set the engineering culture everyone who comes after you will inherit. ### What You'll Do * Ship end-to-end: take problems from failure detection through ingest, patch generation, and verification into a product customers actively use. * Own the trust surface — reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories. * Move from customer conversation to shipped solution without waiting for formal specs or sign-off. * Work directly with customers: read their traces, join their channels, and surface what broke before anyone else does. * Make architectural calls that last — schema design, service boundaries, and speed-vs-correctness tradeoffs. * Define engineering culture from scratch: testing standards, on-call practices, and ship criteria. * Work across the full system — some weeks detection quality, some weeks the ingest pipeline, some weeks the review UI. ### What We're Looking For * 3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated track record of working effectively outside your core specialty. * Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, from frontend through core services — it's the entire codebase. * Real comfort with high-volume data: you think in cost-per-event, not just correctness. * Experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail. * Experience designing data pipelines and optimizing systems for scale and cost awareness. * Ability to take ambiguous customer problems and return well-considered solutions independently. * Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems. * Strong product sense — comfortable making architectural decisions with long-term system impact. * **Bonus:** experience with PR review automation, code quality tooling, or early-stage founding team environments. ### Compensation & Benefits Salary range: **$150,000 – $200,000 USD annually.** Visa sponsorship is available. ### Location On-site in **San Francisco, CA, United States.** ## Apply [Apply on Clera]() Canonical job page: