Founding Software Engineer

Clusia; New York (NY); On-site; USD 160,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Clusia is building collaborative AI for financial compliance and payment operations in NYC. We are seeking founding engineers to work closely with the CTO from zero to one, owning core architecture, infrastructure and customer-facing workflows with AI-powered experiences.

You will operate in a lean, high-talent-density team, shipping solutions in a regulated environment and helping position Clusia for global scale with equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval, prompting and production AI systems.
• Ability to build clean, reliable product experiences end to end.
• Familiarity with cloud services, deployment, observability, reliability and security.
• Experience designing tests, benchmarks and feedback loops for models/agents.
• Pragmatic, fast-moving, product-minded approach to ambiguous problems.
• Demonstrated care for users beyond technical elegance.
• A track record of creating things outside work, e.g., side projects or open-source.

Responsibilities

• Own core parts of product and infra from zero to one in a founding team context.
• Understand customer problems deeply and build trusted systems in regulated environments.
• Ship code and deliver end-to-end workflows for AI-powered experiences.

Skills

AI expertise

Full-stack product eng

Infrastructure depth

AI evaluation experience

Startup execution mindset

Empathy for users

Builder energy

Job description

Clusia is led by Reed Switzer, founder of Hopscotch, a B2B payments startup acquired by Avalara / Vista Equity Partners, and Nolan Hendrickson, who previously led engineering teams within Microsoft's Defender organization. The company is venture-backed and has not yet been publicly announced.

Company Description

Compliance operations are broken - not because the rules are wrong, but because the tools are. Critical work is scattered across databases, vendor dashboards, spreadsheets, and email threads, leaving compliance and operations teams to manually stitch everything together with too little support and too little recognition.

Clusia is building collaborative AI for financial compliance and payment operations. Our platform helps teams unify fragmented data, resolve payment issues faster, and manage obligations in one shared, no-code workspace. We're building for the analysts, program managers, and compliance leaders who keep financial systems running safely every day - and who deserve better tools to do their best work.

Role Description

We're beginning to build out the founding team and are looking for a small number of founding engineers to work closely with the CTO from zero to one.

This will not be a big team. We plan to stay lean, with high talent density, no layers, and no fluff. As a founding engineer, you'll own important parts of the product and company from the beginning - from core architecture and infrastructure to customer-facing workflows and AI-powered product experiences.

You won't be handed a neatly scoped ticket queue. You'll be expected to understand customer problems deeply, make good technical decisions in ambiguity, and build systems that can earn trust in a highly regulated environment.

Compensation range:

$160,000 - $225,000 base salary + equity and benefits

Note: This role is in-person in New York City and you are required to ship code.

Why Join

• Compliance tech is next up. We believe compliance is entering the same kind of transformation legal tech has seen over the last two years: large, high-stakes workflows being rebuilt around AI, collaboration, and better systems of record.
• We're building a small, high-talent-density team. Clusia will remain lean by design. There will be few openings and the bar for talent is incredibly high.
• Your work will matter at global scale. The systems we're building will power critical operations for some of the largest financial institutions and technology companies in the world.
• You'll work with founders who have done this before. The founding team has built and sold venture-backed companies in the past and is applying those lessons to build Clusia with focus, urgency, and ambition.

Qualifications

• AI expertise: You have hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval, prompting, and production AI systems.
• Full-stack product engineering: You can build clean, reliable product experiences end to end.
• Infrastructure depth: You're comfortable with cloud services, deployment, observability, reliability, and security.
• AI evaluation experience: You know how to design tests, benchmarks, and feedback loops to measure model and agent quality.
• Startup execution mindset: You're pragmatic, fast-moving, product-minded, and comfortable owning ambiguous technical problems.
• Empathy for users: You care deeply about the people using what you build, not just the technical elegance of the solution.
• Builder energy: You've built things outside of work - maybe a Minecraft server as a kid, a side project, a tool for your friends, a company, an open-source project, or something nobody asked you to build.

Bonus points if you find the easter egg at https://www.clusia.com/careers!