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Clera

Founding Engineer

Clera · San Francisco

Location
San Francisco
Posted
Today
Type
Fulltime / On site
Salary
Not listed — worth asking early.
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What the job really is

About the Role

This is a founding engineer role on a small, high-conviction infrastructure team building a graph-native context and memory platform purpose-built for AI agents. You'll own significant pieces of the core — query engine, graph storage internals, distributed systems — and make architecture decisions that shape the product for years to come. This is not a feature factory; every engineer here has direct influence on the architecture, the roadmap, and the culture.

What You'll Do

  • Own and ship core infrastructure spanning query execution, the graph storage layer, and distributed systems.

  • Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team.

  • Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the category.

  • Participate in architecture reviews and navigate hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences.

  • Help raise the technical ceiling as the team grows.

What We're Looking For

  • 3+ years of relevant engineering experience with strong CS fundamentals — the kind where you reason from first principles.

  • Proficiency in Rust or Go, with hands-on experience building distributed systems (dealbreaker).

  • Experience designing and shipping core infrastructure components — query engines, storage layers, or graph internals — in a production environment (dealbreaker).

  • Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook and an ownership mindset that extends to design docs and architecture decisions.

  • Track record of shipping production systems under real load.

  • Nice to have: experience building or scaling databases or storage infrastructure; open-source contributions in systems-level projects; prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure background.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $160,000 – $270,000 USD annually, plus meaningful equity. Learning budget, flexible PTO, and wellness perks included. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.

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