Founding Backend Engineer - AI Messaging Infrastructure

Clera; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Clera is seeking a founding backend engineer to own and scale our AI assistant’s backend infrastructure. You will design and operate messaging pipelines, build an agent runtime for background tasks, and implement scheduling across time zones.

You will lead capacity planning, optimize databases, and ensure data security, observability, and efficient costs. This role includes mentoring future engineers and establishing backend engineering practices.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with production systems handling meaningful traffic.
• Deep experience with distributed systems including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure modes.
• Track record of scaling systems during rapid growth and making critical decisions.
• Production experience with Postgres including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning; cloud infra and IaC.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate messaging pipelines with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery across channels.
• Build an agent runtime for background tasks with concurrency, timeouts, and recovery handling.

Skills

Distributed systems

On-call ownership

Capacity planning

Observability

Mentoring

Reliability

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or equivalent

Tools

PostgreSQL

Terraform / IaC

Docker

Kubernetes

TypeScript

Python

Job description

Clera is seeking a founding backend engineer to own and scale our AI assistant’s backend infrastructure. You will design and operate messaging pipelines, build an agent runtime for background tasks, and implement scheduling across time zones.

You will lead capacity planning, optimize databases, and ensure data security, observability, and efficient costs. This role includes mentoring future engineers and establishing backend engineering practices.