Founding Engineer

Clera

$180K — $300K *
Finance & Insurance
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience with production-grade systems and critical technical decision-making.
  • Deep expertise in applied AI, including intelligent agents and model creation for complex processes.
  • Experience with AI components in data-intensive environments.
  • Proven ability to manage end-to-end architecture for complex AI systems.
  • Full-stack AI engineering capability across backend, applied AI, and product layers.
  • Strong focus on engineering reliability and system measurement.
  • Experience in greenfield or first-principles settings is advantageous.
  • Background in financial services or complex workflows is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Develop AI models that analyze business operations and decision-making propagation.
  • Design and implement agents for coordinating financial tasks across multiple stakeholders.
  • Manage the entire architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and user interfaces for AI systems.
  • Participate in selecting team members and setting engineering standards.
  • Translate complex, ambiguous challenges into operational AI products.

Benefits

  • Equity included.
  • On-site work in San Francisco, CA.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at an AI-native fintech company building autonomous systems to manage complex financial transactions end-to-end. You will own the technical core of a product that coordinates multi-party financial workflows, models businesses, and reasons about markets at scale. Your decisions will define the architecture and capabilities of the platform from day one.
What You'll Do
  • Build intelligence that models businesses, reconciles contradictory evidence, and reasons about how decisions propagate through companies and markets.
  • Design and ship agents that coordinate months of financial work across hundreds of counterparties, preserving context, commitments, and dependencies as conditions change.
  • Own end-to-end architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and product interfaces for complex AI systems.
  • Help select technical teammates and establish engineering and operating standards for the team.
  • Move fluidly across backend systems, applied AI, and product interfaces to turn ambiguous problems into working products.
What We're Looking For
  • 8 or more years of experience shipping difficult, production-grade systems and owning critical technical decisions.
  • Deep expertise in applied AI, including building intelligent agents and models for complex business processes.
  • Experience with AI components such as retrieval, memory systems, and evaluation frameworks, especially in data-intensive environments.
  • Proven ability to own end-to-end architecture and infrastructure for complex AI systems.
  • Full-stack AI engineering capability: comfortable working across backend, applied AI, and product layers.
  • Strong commitment to engineering craftsmanship, system reliability, and measuring whether systems actually work.
  • Experience building in greenfield or first-principles environments is a strong plus.
  • Background in financial services, investment banking, or other complex professional workflows is an advantage.
Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Equity included. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location

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

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