Founding Engineer

Clera

$180K — $250K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3-8 years of full-stack engineering experience at startups or top-tier tech firms.
  • Production proficiency in TypeScript, Node.js, React, and Next.js.
  • Hands-on experience with LLM APIs or agent SDKs in real-world applications.
  • Depth in production voice/SMS agents or marketplace product architectures.
  • Ability to make independent product decisions and lead customer discovery.
  • Experience in Python for real-time voice pipelines or evaluation tooling is a strong plus.
  • Familiarity with infrastructure tools like Redis, BullMQ, and Vercel is beneficial.

Responsibilities

  • Own an entire product domain from architecture to daily production deploys.
  • Join customer calls, synthesize feedback, and make independent product decisions.
  • Build and optimize multi-modal AI agents targeting low latency and high response rates.
  • Drive architecture and quality standards for non-deterministic systems.
  • Work full-stack across React/Next.js frontends, Node.js backends, and Python services.

Benefits

  • Equity participation in the company's ownership.
  • Join a founding engineering team with high autonomy and influence.
  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI technology in a niche market.
  • Engage directly with customers to shape product development.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding engineering seat on a small, fast-moving team building multi-modal AI agents across voice, SMS, and email for the sports and youth-activity industry. You'll own one of four core domains end-to-end - B2B product, agent quality, family graph infrastructure, or B2C consumer product - and work directly with customers to shape the product without a dedicated PM layer.
What You'll Do
  • Own an entire product domain from architecture to daily production deploys.
  • Join customer calls, synthesize feedback, and make independent product decisions.
  • Build and optimize multi-modal agents targeting sub-500ms voice latency, high SMS response rates, and persistent conversation state across channels.
  • Drive architecture and quality standards for non-deterministic systems, including evals, prompt versioning, guardrails, and drift detection.
  • Work full-stack across React/Next.js frontends, Node.js backends, and Python voice services.
What We're Looking For
  • 3-8 years of full-stack engineering experience shipping 0-to-1 products at high-growth startups, top-tier tech companies, or as a founder.
  • Production proficiency in TypeScript with hands-on experience in Node.js, React, and Next.js.
  • Hands-on production experience with LLM APIs or agent SDKs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, LangGraph, or similar) - not just tutorials or prototypes.
  • Depth in at least one area: production voice/SMS agents, long-running agent state and memory, B2B2C or marketplace product architecture, or agent evals and guardrails.
  • Comfortable making product decisions independently and running customer discovery without PM support.
  • Python experience with real-time voice pipelines (LiveKit, Deepgram, STT/TTS) or evaluation tooling (LLM-as-judge frameworks) is a strong plus.
  • Familiarity with infrastructure tools such as Redis, BullMQ, Vercel, Render, Sentry, or PostHog is a plus.
  • Founder background with demonstrated traction (revenue, funding, or acquisition) and clear learnings from failure is valued but not required.
  • No visa sponsorship available; must be authorized to work in the US.
Compensation & Benefits

Base salary $180,000 - $250,000 annually, plus equity. No visa sponsorship is available.
Location

On-site five days per week in New York City, NY (Chelsea). Remote arrangements are not available for this role.

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