Founding Engineer
Role summary by JobGrid
Founding Engineer at clera: San Francisco, United States; On-site; Senior; IT; Back End Engineer. This listing is part of JobGrid's Software engineer jobs from public company career pages. JobGrid adds normalized role facts, source context, and a path to the employer application page so candidates can compare the listing before applying.
- Location and workplace: San Francisco, United States, On-site
- Role classification: IT, Back End Engineer, Senior
- Source freshness: checked by JobGrid on 2026-06-05.
- Application path: candidates continue to the employer application page with non-personal referral tags.
About the Role
A seed-stage AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their early team in San Francisco. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone who thinks from first principles, thrives in ambiguity, and aspires to build companies someday. You'll work directly with the founding team to shape core architecture and technical strategy as the company pushes toward Series A.
The platform delivers deep, real-time intelligence on people to power AI agents and next-generation applications — processing data across social networks and online platforms at scale.
What You'll Do
Design, build, and operate core infrastructure for a people-data and agent platform, including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture.
Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a strong focus on performance, cost efficiency, and reliability across cloud and Linux server environments.
Own projects end-to-end — from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration — shipping quickly without sacrificing system integrity.
Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices.
Contribute broadly across the stack: developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test APIs.
What We're Looking For
Required: 1+ years of professional experience shipping software to production.
Experience with APIs, LLMs, and AI agent frameworks.
Comfort working with distributed systems, microservices, and cloud infrastructure (AWS and/or GCP).
Hands-on experience with data pipelines, database optimization, and Linux server environments.
High agency — someone who can take an ambiguous problem and drive it to a solution independently.
First-principles thinker who is energized by early-stage, fast-moving environments.
Nice to have: Experience with large-scale knowledge graph architecture or web scraping systems at scale.
Visa sponsorship: Not available.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $150,000 – $220,000 USD annually
Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding engineering role
Location
This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. Candidates should be based in or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.