Clera

Founding Full Stack Engineer

San Francisco
Salary
$180,000 - $230,000 annually
Level
Mid
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Not offered

Open. First seen 6 November 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

A well-funded, early-stage B2B SaaS startup in the AI-powered sales automation space is hiring its first Founding Engineer. You'll join the CTO as a core member of a tiny, high-caliber team and help set the technical culture for everyone who comes after. The company builds self-improving conversational agents that run product demos 24/7 — adapting to each buyer, handling technical questions, and getting smarter with every conversation. Growth has tripled month-over-month and demand is accelerating.

What You'll Work On

There are no strict lanes here. You'll own problems across the full stack, from LLM orchestration to embeddable frontend widgets to eval pipelines. Key technical pillars include:

  • The Agent: LLM orchestration, conversation flow, tool use, and voice. Agents must understand unfamiliar products and explain them clearly to prospects with varying levels of context.
  • The Experience: Embeddable, generative UI that adapts in real-time — fast-loading, interactive, and responsive across products and screen sizes.
  • The Platform: Customer-facing tooling for configuring agents, managing flows, reviewing conversations, and measuring performance.
  • Evals & Self-Improvement: Pipelines that measure agent quality and feed learnings back automatically, so demos get smarter without manual intervention.
  • Infrastructure: Zero cold starts, instant agent response, and versioning systems that let customers preview changes before they go live.

Day-to-Day Examples

  • Debug conversation logs, trace where an LLM lost the thread during a pricing objection, and ship a fix to the orchestration layer by lunch.
  • Prototype a generative UI widget in an afternoon based on a whiteboard sketch and have something demo-able by end of day.
  • Trace a quality regression to a prompt change, roll it back, and add an automated test to prevent recurrence.
  • Design agent versioning infrastructure from scratch so customers can safely preview updates.

What We're Looking For

Required:

  • Proven experience designing and building LLM-based conversational agents — orchestration, tool use, prompt engineering, and conversation flow.
  • Production backend development experience in Python (services, APIs, backend infrastructure).
  • Frontend experience with React — building interactive, adaptive UIs and rapid prototyping.
  • Demonstrated ability to deliver full-stack features end-to-end: frontend, backend, integration, and deployment.
  • Experience building evaluation pipelines, automated regression tests, observability tooling, and CI/CD workflows.
  • Experience designing deployment and versioning infrastructure for agents (feature flags, preview environments, versioned rollouts).
  • Experience with voice-enabled or browser-based agents (STT/TTS, WebRTC, or browser automation) or equivalent voice/browser + LLM integration experience.
  • Experience deploying and operating production services on cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) with Docker; Kubernetes or similar orchestration a plus.
  • Strong product sense: ability to rapidly prototype, iterate on feedback, and prioritize high-impact work in a fast-moving environment.
  • Experience at an early-stage startup or demonstrated ability to thrive in ambiguous, high-velocity environments.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills — comfortable debugging issues with customers and documenting design decisions clearly.
  • Willingness to be available for urgent production issues and participate in on-call or incident response rotations.

Nice to Have:

  • Familiarity with reinforcement learning workflows (RL, RLHF, reward modeling) or experimentation frameworks applied to agent improvement.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $180,000 – $230,000 USD annually
  • Early-stage equity commensurate with founding engineer role
  • Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States

Location

This role is fully on-site in San Francisco, CA, five days per week. Remote or hybrid arrangements are not available for this position.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

Docker · GCP · Kubernetes · Prompt Engineering · WebRTC

Rare in Clera's other 182 open postings.

Standard for full stack roles

AWS · CI/CD · Python · React

Common in full stack postings at any company.

Compared with Clera's other open jobs.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 357 open in Engineering. 225 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 (181 of 357), TypeScript (179 of 357), React (155 of 357), Python (150 of 357), Machine Learning (75 of 357), Supabase (73 of 357), PostgreSQL (69 of 357)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

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

Posting history

Reposted once since 9 September 2026: a posting for this role in San Francisco was taken down and the role was posted again.

Salary context

9 other open postings titled Founding Full Stack Engineer state a salary: median USD 160,000 to USD 220,000 a year.

See Full Stack Engineer salaries in San Francisco →

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