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Clera

Founding Backend Engineer

San Francisco
Salary
$200,000 - $300,000 annually
Level
Mid
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Not offered

Open. First seen 22 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

Build and operate the backend for an AI assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will own systems where reliable, timely message delivery is essential and help shape the team's engineering standards.

What You'll Do

  • Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery tracking.
  • Build the background agent runtime, including concurrency controls, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
  • Develop scheduling systems for future actions that must run reliably and in the correct time zone.
  • Plan capacity, load-test services, optimize databases, and make architectural improvements to support growth.
  • Own security and privacy practices, including credential encryption, Postgres schemas and migrations, and data deletion workflows.
  • Build observability and cost tracking that traces messages through downstream model and tool calls.
  • Set backend engineering standards and help recruit and mentor a growing engineering team while remaining hands-on.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial production on-call responsibility.
  • Deep distributed systems experience with queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and production failure modes.
  • Experience scaling production systems through rapid growth and making sound tradeoffs about what to address immediately.
  • Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning, as well as cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code.
  • Experience shipping production systems in TypeScript or Python.
  • Background in messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have real costs.
  • Experience with observability, distributed tracing, capacity planning, and measuring latency and cost.
  • Hands-on technical leadership and familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows, including verifying and owning generated code.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.

What this role asks for

Standard for backend roles

PostgreSQL · Python

Common in backend postings at any company.

Compared with Clera's other open jobs.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 406 open in Engineering. 340 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in March: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

LLM (170 of 406), Python (170 of 406), TypeScript (159 of 406), React (126 of 406), Machine Learning (98 of 406), PostgreSQL (74 of 406), JavaScript (69 of 406)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Clera's own job board.

Other openings for this role

2 open postings for this role in San Francisco, first posted 14 October 2026. The company is likely hiring for more than one position. None has been taken down and posted again.

See Backend Engineer salaries in San Francisco →

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