Founding Engineer, Environments + Data

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

Benefits offered by this job

Founding equity

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Clera Labs, Inc. in San Francisco is seeking a founding engineer to build evaluation environments and benchmarks that measure whether AI agents can perform real-world company work and meet or exceed human performance.

You will design synthetic company environments with realistic emails, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods. You will build graders and evaluation systems capable of assessing advanced agents, including cases where human reviewers may lack the relevant

Qualifications

• Hands-on research experience in synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or model post-training.
• Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents in an AI lab.
• 1–2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup with mid-level or senior engineering or research experience.
• Degree from a highly selective university or equivalent credential (founding a company or founder programs count).
• High-level competition experience in math, programming, debate, or games is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design synthetic company environments with realistic emails, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods.
• Build graders and evaluation systems capable of assessing advanced agents and cases where human reviewers lack expertise.
• Develop benchmarks that correlate with real-world production performance.
• Find and address evaluation failure modes, including reward hacking and benchmark gaming.
• Simulate software tools such as inboxes and CRMs to support agent interactions at scale.

Skills

Synthetic data pipelines

Benchmarks

Grading systems

Agent evaluation

Education

Selective university degree

Job description

About the Role

Build evaluation environments and benchmarks that measure whether AI agents can perform real-world company work and meet or exceed human performance. This founding engineering role combines agent evaluation research with production readiness, helping establish reliable evidence of agent capability.

What You'll Do

• Design synthetic company environments with realistic email, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods.

• Build graders and evaluation systems capable of assessing advanced agents, including cases where human reviewers may lack the relevant expertise.

• Develop benchmarks that correlate with real-world production performance.

• Find and address evaluation failure modes, including reward hacking and benchmark gaming.

• Simulate software tools such as inboxes and CRMs with enough fidelity to support agent interactions at scale.

What We're Looking For

• Hands-on research experience in synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or model post-training; this is a research-oriented role, not a pure infrastructure engineering position.

• Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents at a frontier AI lab, and implementing graders or evaluation systems for AI agents.

• At least 1 to 2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup, plus mid-level or senior engineering or research experience.

• Experience simulating software systems for agent tool use, identifying benchmark flaws, and detecting and fixing reward hacking in evaluation systems.

• A degree from a highly selective university or an equivalent credential, such as founding a company or participating in a recognized founder program.

• High-level competition experience in mathematics, programming, debate, or games is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 annually, with up to $350,000 for exceptional candidates. Additional commission-style bonus of up to $200,000 or more is tied to the value of delivered environments. Meaningful founding equity is included. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site five days per week in San Francisco, California, United States.