Tech Lead

Clera; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Clera in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Tech Lead to shape our engineering foundation, write code, make architectural decisions, and mentor engineers as we scale our AI-powered voice and messaging agents.

You will own deployment and reliability of ML models in a SaaS environment, define strategy, collaborate with product and research, and stay current with LLMs and NLP. This is hands-on leadership with CTO-track influence.

Qualifications

• 6–10+ years in software/ML engineering with leadership roles
• Experience designing and scaling AI/ML systems in cloud SaaS
• Hands-on experience with conversational AI or NLP/LLM
• Proven people management and mentorship skills
• Excellent communication with non-technical audiences

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and lead AI/ML systems powering production agents
• Define engineering strategy balancing delivery and scalability
• Mentor and grow engineers, fostering ownership and quality
• Collaborate with product, research, go-to-market to translate goals into roadmaps
• Own deployment and reliability of ML models and cloud infrastructure
• Stay current with LLMs, NLP, and voice AI

Skills

Leadership

Mentorship

Communication

Cloud platforms

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

About the Role

We're a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered voice and messaging agents for enterprise call centers — automating customer service, lead qualification, and appointment scheduling at scale. Founded in 2023 and operating in a fast-moving space alongside players like Parloa, Vapi, Retell AI, and Cognigy, we're a small, high-velocity team looking for a Tech Lead to help shape our engineering foundation and take us through our next phase of growth.

This is a hands-on leadership role — you'll be writing code, making architectural decisions, and directly mentoring engineers. If you're excited about conversational AI, love building real products that ship to production, and want a clear path toward CTO-track influence, this could be a great fit.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and lead AI/ML systems powering voice and text-based conversational agents in production

• Define and drive the engineering strategy, balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalability

• Mentor and grow a team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and go-to-market teams to translate business goals into technical roadmaps

• Advocate for and communicate technical decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders

• Own deployment and reliability of ML models and cloud infrastructure in a SaaS environment

• Stay current with the latest developments in LLMs, NLP, and voice AI — and bring the best ideas into the product

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 6–10+ years of software/ML engineering experience, with a meaningful portion in leadership or staff-level roles

• Proven experience designing and scaling AI/ML systems, ideally at a cloud-based SaaS company or high-growth startup

• Hands-on expertise with conversational AI, voice technology, and/or NLP/LLM applications

• Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and deploying ML models to production

• Demonstrated people management and mentorship skills — you've led engineers and driven engineering culture

• Excellent communication skills; comfortable bridging technical and non-technical audiences

• Must have the right to work in the United States — no visa sponsorship is available

Nice to Have:

• Experience in call center, customer service automation, or enterprise voice platforms

• Background at an AI-focused startup or conversational AI platform

• Familiarity with real-time audio/speech pipelines or telephony integrations

• Prior experience scaling an engineering team from early-stage through Series A/B

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation details will be discussed during the interview process and will be competitive with early-stage AI startup benchmarks, including equity commensurate with the Tech Lead seniority level.

Location

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We are an in-person / hybrid team — candidates who prefer fully remote arrangements are not a strong fit at this stage. Relocation is welcome; visa sponsorship is not available.