Clera

Founding Engineer

San Francisco
Salary
$150,000 - $250,000 annually
Level
Junior
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

Join a well-funded (Series A/B), stealth-stage consumer tech startup building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform. The product helps people figure out where to go and what to do — combining one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events with a clever, social product experience.

As a Founding Engineer, you'll own problems end-to-end, work directly with founders, and make architectural decisions that shape the core system. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast.

What You'll Work On

  • Search and ranking at massive scale (200M+ places, millions of events)
  • Recommendations and personalization of places and events using embeddings, structured data, and social signals
  • Real-time infrastructure — chat, presence, and location systems that feel instantaneous
  • AI agent pipelines that plan, retrieve, and reason over diverse data sources
  • Map display algorithms that determine what deserves attention
  • Data pipelines that structure large volumes of unstructured web data for novel product experiences
  • Pushing Elasticsearch and vector search to sub-100ms latency across large datasets

Engineering Tracks

You don't need to fit neatly into one area — most people here won't.

Application Engineer (Full-Stack)

  • Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile and web
  • Own features end-to-end from UI to backend
  • Tools: TypeScript, React, React Native, iOS/Android

Data / AI Engineer

  • Build the intelligence layer — search, ranking, pipelines, and agent systems
  • Design systems that operate over large-scale, messy real-world data
  • Tools: Python, TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs, embeddings, retrieval and recommendation systems

What We're Looking For

  • 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience
  • Proven experience building real-time or low-latency production systems
  • Proficiency in search, ranking algorithms, and related infrastructure
  • Experience with data processing pipelines, ML/AI workflows, or data engineering
  • Track record of infrastructure and performance optimization at scale
  • Prior experience at early-stage startups; comfortable operating with high ambiguity
  • Ability to own features end-to-end with cross-functional collaboration (product, design, engineering)
  • Strong problem-solving and fast decision-making in fast-paced environments
  • You care about how something feels, not just whether it works

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually
  • Equity as a founding team member

Location

  • San Francisco, CA — on-site required
  • Candidates must be located in or willing to relocate to San Francisco
  • No visa sponsorship available — must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship

What this role asks for

Standard for software engineering roles

Python

Common in software engineering 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 7 times since 9 September 2026: a posting for this role in San Francisco was taken down and the role was posted again.

Salary context

67 other open postings titled Founding Engineer state a salary: median USD 160,000 to USD 250,000 a year.

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