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 30 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

Join a small team building an AI-powered personal assistant that communicates across text, email, and phone. As the founding backend engineer, you will own the reliable systems behind its messaging and agent workflows, from design through production operations.

What You'll Do

  • Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery tracking.
  • Build background agent runtimes that manage concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
  • Develop scheduling systems for reminders and follow-ups that run reliably in the correct time zone.
  • Improve capacity, performance, and reliability through load testing, database optimization, and infrastructure changes.
  • Own data security and privacy practices, including encrypted credentials, Postgres schemas, migrations, and deletion workflows.
  • Build observability and tracing to measure latency and costs across messages, models, and tools.
  • Establish backend engineering practices and help recruit and mentor future team members while staying hands-on.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial production on-call responsibility.
  • Strong distributed systems experience, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure handling at scale.
  • Experience scaling production systems through rapid growth and making sound technical prioritization decisions.
  • Production experience with TypeScript or Python, Postgres schema design and performance tuning, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure as code.
  • Experience building messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have meaningful costs.
  • Experience with capacity planning, observability, and tracing across distributed services.
  • Hands-on technical leadership and familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows, with the judgment to verify and own shipped code.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

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

What this role asks for

Standard for backend roles

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 201 open in Engineering. 135 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 (94 of 201), TypeScript (88 of 201), Python (81 of 201), React (74 of 201), Machine Learning (41 of 201), PostgreSQL (40 of 201), Supabase (36 of 201)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

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

Posting history

Reposted once since 14 October 2026: a posting for this role in San Francisco was taken down and the role was posted again.

See Backend Engineer salaries in San Francisco →

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