Founding Infrastructure Engineer

Clera

$175K — $300K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3+ years experience in high-growth startups or similar environments.
  • Proven expertise in designing observability pipelines for production.
  • Hands-on skills in Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS.
  • Strong proficiency in TypeScript and familiarity with PostgreSQL.
  • Experience owning infrastructure end-to-end, from design to evolution.
  • Ability to engage as a founding engineer with direct communication and high ownership.

Responsibilities

  • Own the development of a mini cloud platform with self-healing capabilities.
  • Build and scale agent infrastructure for running coding agents.
  • Design and implement observability pipelines for integrations and agents.
  • Establish foundational engineering patterns for future infrastructure hires.
  • Lead hiring efforts and transition into leading the infrastructure team within a year.
  • Ship products frequently and collaborate closely with founders.

Benefits

  • Leadership track with direct ownership and early-stage equity.
  • Visa sponsorship available.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a rare opportunity to join a seed-stage agentic integration platform as the first infrastructure hire, working directly with the CTO on a clear leadership track. You will own the runtime, agent infrastructure, and self-hostable story from day one - setting the engineering patterns that every future infrastructure hire builds on. Within a year, the expectation is that you grow into leading the team that owns this domain.
What You'll Do
  • Own a mini cloud platform - build and maintain a durable execution runtime with sandboxed isolation and self-healing capabilities (think: a Vercel-style platform for integration runtime).
  • Build agent infrastructure - design, ship, and scale the systems that run coding agents writing, testing, and deploying integration code in production.
  • Deliver full observability - design and implement observability pipelines (logs, metrics, tracing) across every integration and agent, packaged as a single-tenant, self-hostable product.
  • Set foundational engineering patterns - make architectural decisions that the entire future infrastructure team will build upon.
  • Hire and grow the team - participate actively in recruiting and, within ~12 months, transition into leading the infrastructure domain.
  • Ship constantly - operate as a peer to the founders; work fast and get things to production regularly.
What We're Looking For

Required:
  • 3+ years of experience at a high-growth startup in fast, ambiguous, under-resourced environments.
  • Proven experience designing and implementing observability pipelines (logs, metrics, tracing) for production systems.
  • Hands-on proficiency with Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS.
  • Strong command of TypeScript and comfort working with PostgreSQL.
  • Track record of owning infrastructure end-to-end - not just operating it, but designing and evolving it.
  • Comfortable operating as a founding-level engineer: high ownership, low ceremony, direct communication with leadership.

Nice to have:
  • Experience building self-hostable / single-tenant deployment products.
  • Background in durable execution frameworks or sandboxed code execution environments.
  • Prior experience hiring and/or leading a small infrastructure or platform team.
  • Background at top-tier engineering organizations (e.g., large cloud providers, developer tooling companies).
Compensation & Benefits
  • Salary: $175,000 - $300,000 USD annually
  • Leadership track with direct ownership and early-stage equity
  • Visa sponsorship available
Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA, United States. Remote work is not available for this position.

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