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Clera

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

San Francisco$180k–$210kfulltimemidAdded today

About this role

Join a Series A AI startup in enterprise marketing compliance as a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer. You'll conduct customer discovery, execute POCs, and directly influence product direction by bridging the gap between customer needs and engineering delivery—traveling to customer sites and shipping solutions at startup velocity.

What you'll do

  • Conduct customer discovery on-site to uncover unmet pain points and translate them into actionable product signals
  • Build and ship POCs quickly—write code, configure integrations, and drive time-to-value within tight timelines
  • Gather structured feedback from the field and identify cross-customer patterns to influence product roadmap priorities
  • Build trust and credibility across engineering, design, sales, and customer leadership without formal authority
  • Collaborate with founders and product leadership to shape roadmap decisions and align engineering work with real customer needs
  • Serve as the external face of the product for enterprise customers, communicating clearly with both technical and executive stakeholders

What they're looking for

  • Full-stack software engineering and rapid prototyping
  • Customer discovery and needs assessment
  • Cross-functional communication and stakeholder management
  • API integrations and workflow automation
  • Product thinking and translating customer feedback into requirements
  • Startup/startup-phase experience and comfort with ambiguity
  • Executive-level communication
  • AI/ML tooling or compliance/regtech platform experience (nice-to-have)

Benefits

  • Early-stage equity as a founding-level engineer
  • Direct influence on product direction and company trajectory
  • Hybrid work arrangement: 3 days on-site in San Francisco with WFH flexibility
  • Opportunity to work across customer discovery, engineering, and product strategy
  • Access to founding team and high-impact decision-making
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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 conducted customer discovery and used that insight to ship a feature or product change—what was the outcome?
  • Describe your experience building POCs or MVPs under tight deadlines. How did you prioritize what to build?
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