Founding Engineer
Founding Engineer at Clera — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Clera
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: Full-time
- Salary: $200,000–$300,000 a year
- Posted: 2026-10-01
About this role
ABOUT THE ROLE
You'll join as the second engineering hire on a founding team building AI agents for industrial ingredient manufacturers, a sector responsible for the ingredients in virtually every food product on the market. This is a ground-floor role where you'll work directly with the founders on every major technical and product decision the company makes.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build backend systems that ingest and process messy real-world documents from customer ERPs and inboxes.
- Develop LLM agents that complete complex, multi-page compliance and food safety documents.
- Own features end to end across the full stack, picking up whatever the company needs next.
- Ship fast and iterate on real user feedback rather than debating architecture.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Prior experience as a founding engineer, founder, or early engineering hire (first 1 to 5 engineers) at a seed or Series A startup.
- Demonstrated 0-to-1 product ownership: you have built and shipped production products or major features end to end, not primarily maintained existing systems.
- Full-stack range across backend, frontend, and infrastructure, with the ability to take a feature from backend service through to the UI without waiting for a specialist.
- LLM and agent work shipped to production, such as RAG pipelines, search, or automation tools, not just demos.
- Strong backend experience including services that ingest and process real-world data, plus relational schema design (Postgres or equivalent).
- Experience with Kotlin and Spring Boot, or another JVM backend (willingness to learn Kotlin is fine).
- Familiarity with React and Next.js on the frontend.
- Cloud infrastructure experience in GCP, AWS, or Azure in production.
- Experience integrating multiple model providers (such as Gemini, Anthropic, or OpenAI) into production systems is a plus.
- Exposure to document processing, PDF parsing, or unstructured data extraction is a plus.
- A high career slope: each role showing increasing ownership, scope, and impact.
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or clearly willing to relocate.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity: 0.5% to 2.0%. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
Full-time, fully on-site in San Francisco, California.
Apply with Beaverhand, the recruiting company that advocates for you and can negotiate your offer