Founding Engineer

Clera

$170K — $220K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in production software or equivalent in a startup environment.
  • Strong background in launching products within early-stage teams with fast iteration cycles.
  • Hands-on experience with LLM applications and agent-based systems like RAG and model fine-tuning.
  • Full-stack development experience including backend, frontend, infrastructure, and AI components.
  • Proven ability to design and maintain high-scale distributed systems.
  • Familiarity with infrastructure as code and deployment automation practices.
  • Expertise in areas like antibot systems and web automation is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Build autonomous agents for web data extraction in diverse environments.
  • Design and iterate a full-stack application for non-technical users.
  • Maintain and enhance backend architecture for high request processing capacity.
  • Contribute across the entire tech stack, including ML pipelines and infrastructure code.
  • Iterate quickly and adaptively to meet product development needs.

Benefits

  • Equity options included.
  • Visa sponsorship available for eligible candidates.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a seed-stage data infrastructure company, working directly with the CTO to build core systems for extracting, analyzing, and visualizing web data at scale. You will own large, meaningful pieces of the product, from autonomous agents to distributed backend services, powering enterprise customers who depend on reliable, structured web data every day.
What You'll Do
  • Build autonomous agents that solve real-world information extraction problems across diverse and unpredictable web environments.
  • Design and iterate on a full-stack, self-serve application that makes complex workflows intuitive for non-technical users.
  • Maintain and scale backend architecture to reliably process thousands of requests per second and handle tens of millions of rows of data daily.
  • Contribute across the entire stack, including infrastructure as code, ML pipelines, and whatever else the team needs to move fast.
What We're Looking For
  • 5+ years of experience shipping production software, or equivalent demonstrated skill in a 0-to-1 environment.
  • Proven track record launching products in small, early-stage teams with rapid iteration cycles.
  • Hands-on experience building LLM applications and agentic systems, including RAG, model evaluation, and fine-tuning.
  • Full-stack capability spanning backend, frontend, infrastructure, and AI agents.
  • Experience designing and maintaining high-scale distributed systems handling thousands of requests per second.
  • Proficiency with infrastructure as code and deployment automation.
  • Domain expertise in antibot systems, reverse engineering, JavaScript deobfuscation, or browser automation is a strong plus.
  • Experience with web scraping, data extraction, or web automation at scale is a strong plus.
  • Strong bias toward action and genuine excitement about the pace and autonomy of early-stage startups.
Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $170,000 to $220,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location

On-site in New York City, NY. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to New York City to work in person with the team.

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