Founding Engineer

Clera

$160K — $270K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • At least 3 years of relevant engineering experience.
  • Proficiency in Rust or Go, or a strong drive to learn one deeply.
  • Hands-on experience with designing and shipping infrastructure components like query engines or storage layers.
  • Strong computer science fundamentals and reasoning from first principles.
  • Comfort with large, ambiguous problems and an ownership mindset.
  • Experience with distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure is a plus.
  • Open-source contributions to systems-level projects are a bonus.

Responsibilities

  • Own and ship core infrastructure components such as query execution and distributed systems.
  • Make architecture decisions that influence product direction long-term.
  • Contribute to benchmarking and research to define technical platform direction.
  • Participate in architecture reviews and tackle significant technical trade-offs.
  • Help elevate technical standards as the engineering team expands.

Benefits

  • Meaningful equity ownership in the company.
  • Opportunity to influence product roadmap and engineering culture directly.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a core infrastructure engineering role at an early-stage, graph-native database company building memory and context infrastructure for AI agents. You will own significant parts of the platform, including the query engine, storage layer, and graph internals, and make architecture decisions that shape the product for years to come. The team is small, moves fast, and every engineer has direct influence on the roadmap and culture.
What You'll Do
  • Own and ship core infrastructure components: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems.
  • Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team.
  • Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical direction of the platform.
  • Participate in architecture reviews and work through hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences.
  • Help raise the technical ceiling as the engineering team grows.
What We're Looking For
  • At least 3 years of relevant engineering experience.
  • Proficiency in Rust or Go, or a strong drive to go deep in one of them.
  • Hands-on experience designing and shipping core infrastructure such as query engines, storage layers, or graph internals in production.
  • Strong computer science fundamentals with the ability to reason from first principles, not just frameworks.
  • Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems and operating with an ownership mindset.
  • Experience building or scaling distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure is a strong plus.
  • Open-source contributions to systems-level projects are a bonus.
  • Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure experience is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $160,000 to $270,000 USD annually, plus meaningful equity. The company wants builders to own a real piece of what they create. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.

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