Founding Engineer

Clera

$140K — $220K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of full-stack experience with TypeScript, Next.js, and Python.
  • Experience in building production-ready AI agents, inclusive of context engineering and tool design.
  • Proficiency in deploying and managing applications on Google Cloud Platform.
  • Skilled in integrating legacy systems and third-party APIs, especially in enterprise contexts.
  • Strong customer discovery ability to translate business needs into technical solutions.
  • Experience in automated testing and observability tooling for production environments.
  • Comfortable in early-stage startup settings with a focus on ownership and rapid iteration.

Responsibilities

  • Own end-to-end feature development, from customer conversations to deployment.
  • Work on customer-facing features, AI integration, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Enhance tools and processes for quick and reliable customer implementations.
  • Ship your first feature to a live customer within the first week.
  • Engage with customers within the first month to identify and solve real problems.
  • Own a substantial area of the product within the first quarter.
  • Shape the product and engineering culture as the founding engineer.

Benefits

  • Equity aligned with the founding engineer position.
  • Visa sponsorship offered for eligible candidates.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is the first engineering hire at a fast-moving, early-stage B2B SaaS company closing the deployment gap for industrial operations. The platform automates critical back-office and sales workflows - quoting, order entry, sales intelligence, and more - for distributors and manufacturers. The product is already live with enterprise customers, and demand for the next wave of automation is growing fast.

As a Founding Engineer, you won't be handed a narrow backlog. You'll own problems end to end: talking directly to customers, figuring out what to build, and shipping it. You'll shape the product, the codebase, and the engineering culture from the ground up.
What You'll Do
  • Own features and problems completely - from customer conversations through design, implementation, and deployment.
  • Work across customer-facing features, AI agents, third-party integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Build and improve the evals, tests, and tooling that make each new customer implementation faster and more reliable.
  • Week one: Ship your first feature to a live customer.
  • Month one: Get on a customer call, identify a real problem, design and implement a solution.
  • Quarter one: Own a meaningful, end-to-end surface area of the product.
What We're Looking For

Must-haves:
  • Full-stack experience building and shipping production web applications with TypeScript, Next.js, and Python.
  • Demonstrated experience building production-ready AI agents, including context engineering, tool design, and evaluation frameworks.
  • Experience deploying and managing applications on Google Cloud Platform.
  • Experience integrating with legacy systems, third-party APIs, and enterprise software platforms (e.g. ERPs, CRMs).
  • Proven ability to conduct customer discovery, gather requirements, and translate messy business problems into clean technical solutions.
  • Experience building and maintaining automated testing, evaluation frameworks, and observability tooling for production systems.
  • Comfort working in early-stage startup environments - small teams, rapid iteration, high ownership.

Nice-to-haves:
  • Experience with LLM frameworks, prompt engineering, or AI agent orchestration tools.
  • Familiarity with ERP systems, manufacturing workflows, or B2B operations automation.
  • Experience building integrations with enterprise data or workflow systems.

The right fit: You prefer owning whole problems over working from narrowly defined specs. You're energised by direct customer interaction. You stay current with the bleeding edge of AI tooling while maintaining strong engineering judgment. You thrive without a large team around you.
Compensation & Benefits
  • Salary: $140,000 - $220,000 USD annually
  • Equity commensurate with a founding engineer role
  • Visa sponsorship available
Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA. This is an in-person role - the team works closely together in the office.

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