Founding Engineer - Agentic

Clera; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

On-site in San Francisco (SF)

Job summary

Clera is building a seed-stage, flexible workforce marketplace and is seeking a founding-level software engineer to own the entire agent layer end-to-end. You will work alongside the CTO to shape production systems with real-world impact in a fast-moving environment.

You will define patterns, enable rapid agent creation, and contribute to hiring as the team scales. Visa sponsorship is available for the right candidate, and the role is on-site in San Francisco.

Qualifications

• 2–9 years of professional software engineering experience with hands-on IC focus.
• Degree in engineering, computer science, or a quantitative field from a strong technical university.
• Experience at an early-stage startup; not a pure enterprise background.

Responsibilities

• Own the full agent layer: context engineering, self-learning systems, evals, the agent harness, and the meta-harness.
• Build a compounding knowledge base of undocumented systems so that each new integration gets faster and better than the last.
• Design and ship self-healing workflows where agents detect, diagnose, and autonomously recover from production failures.
• Build and maintain the meta-harness that lets the team create, evaluate, and evolve new agents in days.
• Set engineering patterns that every future agent on the platform follows.
• Help hire and grow the agentic engineering team over time.
• Work as a peer to the founding team and experiment relentlessly.

Skills

Software engineering

Startup experience

Agentic systems

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

Education

Engineering/Computer Science or quantitative degree

Tools

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

LLMs

Agent frameworks

Job description

About the Role

This is a founding-level engineering role at a seed-stage flexible workforce marketplace, sitting directly alongside the CTO to own the entire agent layer end-to-end. You will set the patterns for how every agent in the platform gets built, measured, and improved, working on production systems with real-world consequences at scale. This is a rare opportunity to define the architecture of agentic software in a domain where no one has fully solved it yet.

What You'll Do

• Own the full agent layer: context engineering, self-learning systems, evals, the agent harness, and the meta-harness.

• Build a compounding knowledge base of undocumented systems so that each new integration gets faster and better than the last.

• Design and ship self-healing workflows where agents detect, diagnose, and autonomously recover from production failures.

• Build and maintain the meta-harness that lets the team create, evaluate, and evolve new agents in days.

• Set engineering patterns that every future agent on the platform follows.

• Help hire and grow the agentic engineering team over time.

• Work as a peer to the founding team and experiment relentlessly.

What We're Looking For

• 2 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, with a hands-on individual contributor focus.

• Completed or in-progress engineering, computer science, or quantitative degree from a strong technical university.

• Prior experience at an early-stage, venture-backed startup, whether as a founder or an early engineer. A background exclusively in large enterprises or big tech does not fit this role.

• Proven experience building agentic software within the past year. This field moves fast and recent hands-on work is essential.

• Experience building context or self-learning systems that improve agent performance through accumulated knowledge.

• Experience building autonomous failure detection, diagnosis, or self-healing production workflows.

• Deep understanding of agent tracing, evals, and eval-driven iteration.

• Comfortable building reusable agent harnesses or meta-harnesses for rapidly creating and evolving agents.

• Strong implementation focus: you ship working systems in production, not research prototypes.

• Proficiency with TypeScript and PostgreSQL; familiarity with LLMs and agent frameworks is expected.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $150,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available where an O-1 visa is a realistic path.

Location

On-site five days a week in San Francisco, CA. Candidates currently based elsewhere in the US are welcome with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco.