Founding ML Research Engineer: AI Agent Systems Lead

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

Job summary

Clera in San Francisco, a Y Combinator-backed AI startup, seeks a hands-on ML/engineering leader to join the founding team. You will lead research and systems that improve answer quality while managing latency and cost, and ship improvements to users regularly.

Responsibilities include building evaluation harnesses, post-training models, and designing robust model routing. You will tackle prompts, memory, and tool-use decisions, ensuring safe, scalable AI agents. On-site work in SF.

Qualifications

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Responsibilities

• Build evaluation harnesses with model judges, human preference data, and regression tests.
• Post-train models via supervised fine-tuning, preference tuning, and distillation, then ship results to production.
• Develop model routing that balances answer quality, latency, and cost across smaller and frontier models.
• Improve agent performance on websites without APIs, including navigation, sign-in, and checkout, with escalation when needed.
• Identify and address prompt injection, data leakage, and other risks through adversarial testing and evaluations.
• Advance memory, retrieval, tool selection, and decisions about when the agent should act or ask for help.
• Review real conversations and turn findings into evaluation and model improvements.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

LLM fine-tuning

Evaluation tools

Job description

Clera in San Francisco, a Y Combinator-backed AI startup, seeks a hands-on ML/engineering leader to join the founding team. You will lead research and systems that improve answer quality while managing latency and cost, and ship improvements to users regularly.

Responsibilities include building evaluation harnesses, post-training models, and designing robust model routing. You will tackle prompts, memory, and tool-use decisions, ensuring safe, scalable AI agents. On-site work in SF.