Founding Engineer

Clera

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

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience in developing production-grade systems.
  • Expertise in applied AI with a focus on intelligent agents for complex workflows.
  • Comprehensive full-stack AI engineering experience.
  • Familiarity with retrieval, memory systems, and data evaluation frameworks.
  • Proven ability in building AI models for business process automation.
  • Experience in creating architecture for complex AI systems from the ground up.
  • Background in financial services or document intelligence is advantageous.
  • Experience with AI-driven fintech tools is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Select and shape the initial technical team, establishing engineering standards.
  • Develop intelligence systems that understand and model business dynamics.
  • Create agents that manage complex financial tasks across multiple parties.
  • Oversee the architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and product interfaces for production AI systems.
  • Translate ambiguous high-stakes problems into reliable, functioning products.

Benefits

  • Equity offered as part of the compensation package.
  • On-site work in San Francisco, CA.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding engineer role at an AI-native fintech startup building an autonomous system that understands businesses, finds buyers, structures financing, and manages deals end-to-end. You will own the most critical technical challenges at any given time and help shape the institution from first principles alongside an exceptional early team.
What You'll Do
  • Help select and shape the early technical team, setting standards for how the engineering organization operates.
  • 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 complex financial work across hundreds of counterparties, preserving context, commitments, and dependencies as conditions evolve.
  • Own end-to-end architecture, evaluations, infrastructure, and product interfaces for production AI systems.
  • Move from ambiguous, high-stakes problems to working, reliable products across backend systems, applied AI, and user-facing interfaces.
What We're Looking For
  • 8+ years of experience shipping production-grade systems and owning critical technical decisions.
  • Deep hands-on expertise in applied AI, particularly building intelligent agents for complex, multi-party workflows.
  • Full-stack AI engineering background spanning backend systems, AI components, and product interfaces.
  • Experience with retrieval, memory systems, and evaluation frameworks in data-intensive environments.
  • Track record building AI models for business-process automation, evidence reconciliation, or decision propagation.
  • Experience owning greenfield or first-principles architecture for complex AI systems.
  • Background in financial services, document intelligence, or other complex professional workflows is a strong plus.
  • Experience at AI/ML document-intelligence or fintech research-tooling companies is a plus.
  • Strong drive for ownership, craftsmanship, and measuring whether systems actually work in the real world.
Compensation & Benefits

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

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

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