Founding Engineer (Full Stack)

Clera

$180K — $230K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of full-stack engineering experience with a VC-backed B2B SaaS startup.
  • Proficient in React (frontend) and Python (backend).
  • Experience building production AI agent features, including LLM agents or agent orchestration frameworks.
  • Skilled in designing and maintaining evaluation pipelines for model outputs, including regressions.
  • Strong front-end skills with a good UX sensibility for customer-facing products.
  • Ability to translate user feedback into functional features.
  • Strong engineering judgment on product readiness and deployment.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture and development of AI-driven product demo agents.
  • Develop and implement LLM orchestration and conversation flow capabilities.
  • Create a generative UI responsive to real-time user interactions.
  • Build customer-facing tools for agent configuration and performance metrics.
  • Establish a self-improvement pipeline for agent quality and learning.
  • Ensure zero cold-start reliability for instant demo responsiveness.
  • Design infrastructure for agent versioning and preview functionalities.

Benefits

  • Equity opportunity as a founding engineer.
  • Full-time position with the possibility for professional growth.
  • Work closely with the CTO to shape technical culture and architecture.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a fast-growing, seed-stage startup building AI-powered autonomous product demo agents for B2B GTM teams. The company has tripled in the past month, is backed by top-tier investors (Series A/B range), and is now assembling a small A-team to scale. You will be one of two founding engineers, working directly with the CTO - setting the technical culture and architecture for everyone who comes after.

The technical surface area is broad and genuinely novel: voice, browser agents, LLM orchestration, generative UI, reinforcement learning, and self-improvement loops. There is no narrow lane here. The best problems are unsolved because nobody has had to solve them before.

No visa sponsorship available. On-site in San Francisco, 5 days/week required.
What You'll Do

You'll own work across four core technical pillars:
  • The Agent: LLM orchestration, conversation flow, tool use, and voice. Building agents that understand products they've never seen and explain them clearly to prospects with varying levels of context.
  • The Experience: Embeddable, generative UI that adapts in real-time - fast loads, complex interactive demos, responsive across products and screen sizes.
  • The Platform: Customer-facing tooling for configuring agents, managing conversation flows, reviewing transcripts, and measuring performance.
  • Evals & Self-Improvement: The pipeline that measures agent quality, detects regressions, and feeds learnings back so demos improve without manual intervention.
  • Infrastructure: Zero-cold-start reliability - when a prospect clicks "start demo," the agent responds instantly.

In practice, your week might look like:
  • Diagnosing a conversation log to find where an LLM lost the thread during a pricing objection, then shipping a fix to the orchestration layer by lunch.
  • Prototyping a generative UI widget that adapts its layout in real-time based on prospect intent - demo-able by end of day.
  • Tracing an eval regression to a prompt change, rolling it back, and adding a test to prevent recurrence.
  • Designing agent versioning infrastructure from scratch so customers can preview changes before they go live.
What We're Looking For

Required:
  • 5+ years of full-stack engineering experience, having built and shipped products at a VC-backed B2B SaaS startup with paying customers.
  • Proficiency in React (frontend) and Python (backend).
  • Hands-on experience building and shipping production AI agent features: LLM agents, RAG pipelines, or agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex).
  • Ability to design, implement, and maintain an evaluation pipeline for model outputs, including regression tracing and rollback mechanisms.
  • Experience building versioning and preview mechanisms for deployed AI agents.
  • Strong front-end skills and UX sensibility; demonstrated ability to build polished, customer-facing products.
  • Comfort translating user feedback and product requirements directly into implemented features.
  • Strong engineering judgment - you know when something is ready to ship and when it isn't.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
  • Ability to work on-site in San Francisco 5 days per week.

Nice to Have:
  • Experience at a VC-backed sales technology or GTM tooling startup.
  • Familiarity with the interactive demo / product experience tooling space (e.g., companies like Walnut, Demostack, Navattic, Arcade, Storylane, or similar).
Compensation & Benefits
  • Salary: $180,000 - $230,000 USD annually
  • Founding engineer equity commensurate with role and stage
  • Full-time position
Location
  • San Francisco, California, United States
  • On-site, 5 days per week
  • No visa sponsorship available

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