Founding Applied AI Engineer

CLERA; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

CLERA, an early-stage AI company, seeks a senior AI hire to own the quality and intelligence of its multi-channel marketing agents. You will shape agent architecture, evaluation systems, learning loops, and help grow the AI team as the company scales.

You will lead production ML work, design evaluations from outcome signals, and contribute to production AI infrastructure, while collaborating with a small, ambitious team in San Francisco.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building production ML/AI systems, incl. hands-on shipping of LLM products or agents.
• Experience designing evaluations and learning from outcome signals at scale in search, ranking, or recommendations.
• Production AI experience in areas like LLM reasoning, post-training, or generative AI.

Responsibilities

• Improve the quality of agent-generated content for social channels and articles, using evaluation systems to measure quality.
• Improve performance across search engine optimization and generative engine optimization.
• Build feedback loops to help agents learn from real-world results and performance signals.
• Improve production AI infrastructure, agent architecture, model strategy, and data pipelines.
• Help hire and lead the AI team as it grows.

Skills

TypeScript/Next.js

Python data analysis

End-to-end ML/AI systems

Job description

About the Role

As the first senior AI hire at an early-stage AI company, you will own the quality and intelligence of its multi-channel marketing agents. You will shape agent architecture, evaluation systems, and learning loops, and help build the AI team as the company grows.

What You'll Do

• Improve the quality of agent-generated content for social channels and articles, using evaluation systems to make quality measurable.

• Improve performance across search engine optimization and generative engine optimization.

• Build feedback loops that help agents learn from real-world results and performance signals.

• Improve production AI infrastructure, agent architecture, model strategy, and supporting data pipelines.

• Help hire and lead the AI team as it grows.

What We're Looking For

• At least 3 years of experience building production ML or AI systems, including recent hands-on work shipping LLM products or agents.

• Experience designing evaluations and learning from outcome signals at scale in search, ranking, recommendations, or related areas.

• Proficiency in TypeScript, including Next.js, and Python for data analysis, evaluations, and model work, with a track record of shipping end to end.

• Production applied AI experience in areas such as LLM reasoning or post-training, generative AI, agentic systems, search, recommendations, algorithms, or machine learning research.

• Experience improving production AI systems and owning work in a startup or small-team environment.

• Background at a leading AI lab or research program, or another achievement demonstrating comparable technical depth.

• Experience with search, ranking, or AI answer engines is valuable. Marketing or go-to-market experience, recommendation systems, algorithms, and reinforcement learning are also relevant.

Compensation & Benefits

Target annual compensation is $180,000 to $230,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.