Clera

Founding Engineer, Environments + Data

San Francisco
Salary
$200,000 - $300,000 annually
Level
Mid
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Sponsors visas

Open. First seen 6 November 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-world company work and meet or exceed human performance. This founding engineering role combines agent evaluation research with production readiness, helping establish reliable evidence of agent capability.

What You'll Do

  • Design synthetic company environments with realistic email, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods.
  • Build graders and evaluation systems capable of assessing advanced agents, including cases where human reviewers may lack the relevant expertise.
  • Develop benchmarks that correlate with real-world production performance.
  • Find and address evaluation failure modes, including reward hacking and benchmark gaming.
  • Simulate software tools such as inboxes and CRMs with enough fidelity to support agent interactions at scale.

What We're Looking For

  • Hands-on research experience in synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or model post-training; this is a research-oriented role, not a pure infrastructure engineering position.
  • Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents at a frontier AI lab, and implementing graders or evaluation systems for AI agents.
  • At least 1 to 2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup, plus mid-level or senior engineering or research experience.
  • Experience simulating software systems for agent tool use, identifying benchmark flaws, and detecting and fixing reward hacking in evaluation systems.
  • A degree from a highly selective university or an equivalent credential, such as founding a company or participating in a recognized founder program.
  • High-level competition experience in mathematics, programming, debate, or games is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 annually, with up to $350,000 for exceptional candidates. 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 available.

Location

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

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 2 times since 19 October 2026: a posting for this role in San Francisco was taken down and the role was posted again.

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PLACESSan Francisco 8,593United States 77,407
COMPANYJobs at Clera 360

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