Staff Engineer - AI Platform & Scalable Systems (SF)

Clera; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Clera in San Francisco, CA is seeking a foundational engineer to design and ship core APIs, LLM-powered workflows, and large-scale data systems. You will own projects from ambiguity to deployment, working directly with executive leadership to shape technical strategy and build the core agent platform from the ground up.

The role emphasizes production-grade systems, performance and cost efficiency, and cross-stack contributions from docs to tooling.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of production software engineering experience.
• Hands-on Linux production experience.
• Experience with LLMs, agent orchestration, or web scraping.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP).
• Startup or high-growth background; founding experience a plus.
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity; first-principles problem-solving.
• Currently based in San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core APIs, LLM-powered workflows, web scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture.
• Architect and maintain production-grade systems handling millions of API requests with focus on performance, cost, and reliability.
• Own projects end-to-end from definition to deployment and iteration while preserving system integrity.
• Collaborate with executive leadership on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and long-term direction.
• Contribute across the stack with documentation, internal tools, and experimental builds.

Skills

Production at scale

System design

Leadership

Ambiguity tolerance

First-principles thinking

Tools

Linux servers

AWS

GCP

Microservices

Data pipelines

Web scraping

LLMs

Agent orchestration

Job description

Clera in San Francisco, CA is seeking a foundational engineer to design and ship core APIs, LLM-powered workflows, and large-scale data systems. You will own projects from ambiguity to deployment, working directly with executive leadership to shape technical strategy and build the core agent platform from the ground up.

The role emphasizes production-grade systems, performance and cost efficiency, and cross-stack contributions from docs to tooling.