Clera

Founding Engineer, Environments + Data

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

Open. First seen 28 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

Build evaluation environments and benchmarks that measure whether AI agents can perform real company work and meet or exceed human performance. This founding engineering role focuses on agent capability assessment and production readiness, helping establish reliable evidence of agent competence.

What You'll Do

  • Design synthetic company environments with realistic email, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods.
  • Create robust graders and evaluation systems for assessing advanced AI agents.
  • Develop benchmarks that correlate with real-world production performance.
  • Identify and address evaluation failures, including reward hacking and benchmark gaming.
  • Simulate software tools such as inboxes and CRMs with sufficient fidelity for agent interactions at scale.

What We're Looking For

  • Hands-on experience with synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or post-training; this role is suited to an AI researcher who builds, not a purely infrastructure-focused engineer.
  • Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents at advanced AI labs, and implementing graders or evaluation systems.
  • At least 1 to 2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup, with experience building synthetic environments or production-like simulations.
  • Ability to identify flaws in established benchmarks and detect and fix reward hacking in evaluation systems.
  • Experience simulating software systems that can withstand agent tool calls.
  • Strong academic or equivalent credentials, such as a top-tier university background, founding experience, or participation in a leading startup program.
  • High-level competition experience in mathematics, programming, debate, or games is valued.

Compensation & Benefits

$200,000 to $300,000 annual base salary, with up to $350,000 for exceptional candidates. An additional commission-style bonus of up to $200,000 or more is tied to the value of delivered environments. Meaningful founding equity is included. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site, five days a week in San Francisco, California, United States.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 210 open in Engineering. 144 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 (103 of 210), TypeScript (95 of 210), Python (82 of 210), React (81 of 210), Machine Learning (42 of 210), PostgreSQL (39 of 210), JavaScript (36 of 210)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

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

Other openings for this role

2 postings for this role in San Francisco since 19 October 2026, 1 still open. None has been taken down and posted again.

  • 28 October 2026 – open (this posting)
  • 19 October 2026 – closed 28 October 2026

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PLACESSan Francisco 7,761United States 72,210
COMPANYJobs at Clera 212

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