Founding Engineer
Clera · San Francisco
OtherEngineeringFullTime
Clera is hiring a Founding Engineer in San Francisco, California (full-time). Posted 11 September 2026. Apply directly on Clera's own careers site — no account needed.
About the Role
This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI startup building tooling that reads agent conversations, surfaces failures, and automatically opens patches for customers to merge. You will own the entire loop, from event ingestion and failure detection through patch generation, verification, and the review UI that customers trust with their repos.
What You'll Do
Ship end-to-end features spanning ingest pipelines, detection logic, patch generation, verification, and the user-facing product.
Own the trust surface: reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories.
Move directly from customer conversation to shipped solution without waiting for formal specs or sign-off.
Talk to customers directly, read their traces, and diagnose what broke before anyone else does.
Make lasting architectural calls on schema design, service boundaries, and speed-versus-correctness tradeoffs.
Set engineering culture from the ground up, including testing standards, on-call practices, and release criteria.
What We're Looking For
3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated track record of working effectively outside a single specialty.
Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, frontend through core services (the entire codebase is TypeScript).
Real comfort with data at volume: you think in cost-per-event and optimize accordingly.
Hands-on experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail.
Experience designing and optimizing high-volume event data pipelines with cost awareness.
Strong product sense: able to take rough, ambiguous problems and return well-considered solutions independently.
Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems.
Comfortable making architectural decisions that shape long-term system design.
Bonus: experience with PR review automation or code quality tooling, and prior early-stage startup experience.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California (six days per week).
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