Clera
Founding Engineer
About this role
Join a seed-stage AI company as the founding engineer, partnering with the CTO to build AI-powered systems that accelerate hardware engineering in defense and medical sectors. You'll own the full technical stack, ship production AI workflows into live customer programs, and establish engineering culture from day one.
What you'll do
- Design system architecture integrating AI agents with CAD, CAE, and PLM tools while meeting defense/medical security requirements
- Own end-to-end production delivery: architecture, observability, evaluation suites, regression testing, and on-call operations
- Ship first production AI workflow into live customer program used by real engineers
- Build evaluation and training loops using simulation data, test cases, and reinforcement learning grounded in physics
- Embed with partner company engineers to identify system failures and translate learnings into platform capabilities
- Scale platform across multiple partners with measurable cycle-time reduction and mentor growing team
What they're looking for
- Python and backend/ML systems engineering for production AI
- LLM agent workflows with tool integration and graceful failure handling
- Evaluation framework design and knowledge of retrieval, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning
- Observability, regression testing, and on-call production system ownership
- CAD, CAE, EDA, or PLM tools (preferred)
- Experience with frontier/applied AI, robotics, or autonomous systems (preferred)
- Customer communication and learning from domain experts
- Full-stack software architecture and production system design
Benefits
- Base salary $150,000–$220,000 USD annually
- Seed-stage equity opportunity
- Full-time, on-site position in NYC
- Opportunity to shape engineering culture at founding stage
- Direct partnership with CTO and early customer impact
- Work on cutting-edge AI systems in high-impact sectors
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Clera
Clera builds an agentic operating system that automates complex workflows and processes through AI agents, with a platform designed to simplify distributed infrastructure management for developers. The company is hiring Founding Engineers, Customer Engineers, and Product Engineers to develop both backend systems and user-facing interfaces across their AI automation products.
View all jobs at CleraLikely interview questions
- Walk us through a production AI system you shipped — what were the biggest technical challenges in getting it live and keeping it reliable?
- Describe an instance where an LLM agent failed in production. How did you diagnose it, and what evaluation framework did you build to prevent it?