Founding AI Engineer

Clera

$225K — $255K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of engineering experience with strong, recent production LLM expertise
  • Authorized to work in the U.S. without visa sponsorship
  • Hands-on experience with LLM system evaluation and observability
  • Experience managing LLM infrastructure and model routing
  • Proficiency in structured data models and typed ontologies

Responsibilities

  • Design and build eval harnesses using tracked pricing outcomes
  • Systematize and automate expert review workflows
  • Develop AI personas simulating B2B buying committees
  • Automate persona training pipelines
  • Own LLM routing across various model providers
  • Maintain infrastructure ensuring data residency compliance
  • Extend MCP server for agent-driven features
  • Identify and remediate issues in the pricing loop

Benefits

  • Founding-team equity opportunity in a high-growth startup
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding-level AI engineering role at an early-stage B2B SaaS pricing intelligence startup based in San Francisco. You'll be one of the first engineers on a small, product-focused team - joining at a formative moment to shape the technical direction of an AI-powered pricing platform used in high-stakes B2B deals.

Your work sits at the intersection of LLM infrastructure, evaluation systems, and revenue-critical product outcomes. You'll build the feedback loops, eval harnesses, and agent tooling that allow a pricing AI to earn trust, remain auditable, and drive measurable business impact for customers.
What You'll Do
  • Design and build eval harnesses and benchmarks that use tracked pricing outcomes as ground truth, supporting release gating against a typed ontology of pricing entities.
  • Systematize and automate expert review workflows currently performed manually.
  • Develop AI personas that simulate B2B buying committees and behavioral effects, leveraging usage data and call transcripts.
  • Automate persona training pipelines that are today manual processes.
  • Own LLM routing across providers (e.g., Anthropic, Google) with explicit cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs.
  • Maintain infrastructure and data residency boundaries (e.g., ensuring EU model calls remain within the EU; SOC2/GDPR compliance).
  • Extend the MCP server used by LLM agents - including customer-facing agents - so that features are agent-driven, not just UI-rendered.
  • Work within a typed ontology of pricing entities (e.g., Pydantic models for SKU, Proposition, Persona, Quote) so model outputs are structured and auditable.
  • Identify and remediate systemic latency, data drift, and cold-start issues in the pricing loop.
What We're Looking For

Dealbreakers
  • 8+ years of engineering experience with strong, recent production LLM depth - including shipping and owning LLM-powered features end-to-end after launch.
  • Must be authorized to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is not available.
  • Hands-on experience building evals and observability for LLM systems - creating eval harnesses, baselining prompts, and supporting release gating.

Required
  • Experience owning LLM infrastructure, including routing across multiple model providers with cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs.
  • Proficiency with structured data models and typed ontologies (e.g., Pydantic) to ensure model outputs are structured and auditable.
  • Full end-to-end ownership of LLM-powered features - from development through production monitoring.
  • Strong communication skills to explain non-deterministic systems to non-technical clients and stakeholders.
  • Product-engineer instincts: ability to scope and deliver pragmatic solutions in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to Have
  • Experience with MCP or building tools/integrations for LLM agents.
  • Familiarity with platforms such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Braintrust, or OpenRouter.
  • Experience in domains where pricing, billing, or payments accuracy and auditability are required.
  • Familiarity with data residency or compliance controls (SOC2, GDPR).
Compensation & Benefits
  • Salary: $225,000 - $255,000 USD annually
  • Founding-team equity opportunity at an early-stage, high-growth startup
Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.

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