Clera

Founding Product Engineer

San Francisco
Salary
$200,000 - $250,000 annually
Level
Senior
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Not offered

Open. First seen 6 November 2026.

About the role

About the Role

We're a small, fast-moving team building an AI-driven pricing and monetization platform that helps B2B companies continuously optimize their pricing strategy — from packaging and willingness-to-pay analysis to deal quoting, discount governance, and CPQ workflows. We're looking for a Founding Product Engineer to own entire product modules end-to-end, work directly with customers, and help set the technical and engineering culture of the company.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the founding-team level. You'll collaborate closely with customers, product, and leadership — and be expected to take ambiguous problems all the way to shipped, production-quality features. Financial logic correctness, AI-native tooling, and clean API design are first-class priorities here.

What You'll Do

  • Own whole product modules end-to-end: scope with customers, design versioned APIs, build the UI, ship, and iterate.
  • Design and evolve architecture for agentic AI systems spanning Slack bots, terminal UIs, web interfaces, and vendor integrations.
  • Ensure product features are drivable by LLM agents via MCP/FastMCP servers and conversational interfaces.
  • Move pricing and business logic off the client into backend services to preserve financial fidelity.
  • Extend and maintain a typed pricing ontology (Pydantic models for SKUs, propositions, personas, pricing structures, etc.).
  • Lead technical discussions and architectural reviews to keep systems robust, extensible, and secure.
  • Establish testing, observability, deployment, and performance monitoring practices for AI-driven features.
  • Mentor peers, influence product strategy, and shape engineering culture and best practices.
  • Treat money-handling code as load-bearing infrastructure; prioritize root-cause analysis for production issues.
  • Adopt and improve an AI-native SDLC where agents assist with code and automated review gates.

What We're Looking For

Required

  • 8+ years of engineering experience with strong full-stack skills and proven ownership of product areas at startup or staff engineer scope.
  • Deep backend expertise — experience with FastAPI, Python, and MongoDB or a comparable modern stack.
  • Credible frontend skills with React and TypeScript; able to ship a clean, polished UI independently.
  • Track record of taking ambiguous customer problems to shipped features without a dedicated PM.
  • Experience designing and building REST or GraphQL APIs with clear contracts and versioning.
  • High standards for correctness, especially around financial or pricing logic.
  • Must be legally authorized to work in the US — no visa sponsorship is available.

Nice to Have

  • Interest or hands-on experience in B2B monetization: pricing models, packaging, quoting, billing, or CPQ.
  • Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Cursor, Copilot) and experience integrating LLM agent tooling or MCP-like servers.
  • Prior experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $200,000 – $250,000 USD annually
  • Early-employee equity commensurate with founding-team scope
  • Opportunity to shape product, architecture, and engineering culture from the ground up

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote or fully distributed arrangements are not available for this position.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

FastAPI · GraphQL · MongoDB · Pydantic · REST

Rare in Clera's other 182 open postings.

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

Salary context

27 other open postings titled Founding Product Engineer state a salary: median USD 175,000 to USD 250,000 a year.

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