Founding Agentic Engineer
Clera
- Location
- Onsite (San Francisco, California)
- Compensation
- $150k - $300k/yr
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
About the Role
Clera is an AI career agent platform connecting candidates with top-tier startups. This founding engineering role involves owning the end-to-end agentic integration layer, building self-learning systems, and establishing production standards for autonomous agent workflows.
Skills
Benefits
- Visa sponsorship
Full job details
About the Role
This is a founding engineering role at an agentic integration platform operating in the flexible work and gig economy space. You will own the agent layer end-to-end, working directly alongside the CTO to build production systems that do real work with real consequences. It is an early, high-ownership position at the frontier of what agentic software can do at scale.
What You'll Do
Own the full agent layer: context engineering, self-learning systems, evals, the agent harness, and the meta-harness.
Build a compounding knowledge base of undocumented systems so that each new integration benefits from everything learned before it.
Design and ship self-healing workflows that detect, diagnose, and recover from production failures autonomously.
Build and maintain the meta-harness that lets the team create, evaluate, and evolve new agents in days rather than weeks.
Set the patterns and standards for how every agent at the company gets built, measured, and improved.
Help grow the team and eventually lead the people who own agentic systems.
Work as a peer to the founding team and experiment relentlessly.
What We're Looking For
2 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, with hands-on agentic software built within the last year.
Strong CS fundamentals, ideally from a technical degree program at a well-regarded university.
Comfortable with TypeScript and working with LLMs, evals, and agent tracing in production.
Experience building context or self-learning systems that accumulate knowledge to improve agent performance over time.
Demonstrated track record of shipping autonomous failure detection, diagnosis, or self-healing workflows to production.
Harness-centric approach to agent building: eval-driven iteration, structured context engineering.
Background at a startup (including YC or top-tier VC-backed companies) or direct founding experience is a strong signal; candidates who have spent their entire career at large tech companies or enterprises are unlikely to be a fit.
Reusable agent harness or meta-harness experience is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship (O-1) is available for qualified candidates with a concrete relocation plan.
Location
On-site, five days a week in San Francisco, CA, United States. Candidates currently based elsewhere in the US are welcome with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco.