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Clera

Founding Engineer

San Francisco$160k–$270kfulltimemidAdded today

About this role

Join a seed-stage AI infrastructure startup as a Founding Engineer to build core systems for a graph-native database platform designed for AI agents. You'll own major architectural components like query engines and storage layers, work directly with founders, and shape the technical direction of a production-grade system backed by prominent AI investors.

What you'll do

  • Own and ship core infrastructure components including query execution, graph storage, and distributed systems
  • Make architectural decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team
  • Contribute to benchmarking and research that defines the technical category
  • Participate in architecture reviews and navigate complex technical trade-offs with production consequences
  • Help establish engineering culture, technical standards, and hiring bar as the team scales
  • Design and implement solutions for large, ambiguous problems without existing playbooks

What they're looking for

  • Systems programming and distributed systems development
  • Rust and/or Go at production level
  • Query execution engine design and implementation
  • Storage layer architecture and optimization
  • Graph database internals
  • Technical design documentation and decision-making
  • Database or distributed storage infrastructure
  • Computer science fundamentals and first-principles thinking

Benefits

  • Early-stage equity with meaningful ownership stake
  • Learning budget for books, courses, conferences, and personal technical experiments
  • Top-tier hardware and software
  • Free daily meals in office
  • Flexible PTO supporting deep work
  • Periodic team offsites and wellness programs
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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.

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Likely interview questions

  • Tell us about a time you designed and shipped a core infrastructure component—walk us through your architecture decisions and trade-offs.
  • Describe your experience building distributed systems. What was the hardest problem you solved, and how did you approach it?
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