Staff Engineer, Agentic AI
Clera
- Location
- Onsite (San Francisco, California)
- Compensation
- $160k - $250k/yr
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
About the Role
Clera is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the development of agentic AI for complex mechanical engineering workflows. In this on-site role in San Francisco, you will architect agent intelligence, establish performance metrics, and drive technical direction for a small AI engineering team.
Skills
Full job details
About the Role
Lead the development of agent intelligence that helps mechanical engineers complete complex, multi-step workflows across desktop engineering software. As a hands-on technical lead on a small AI engineering team, you will shape the agent architecture, connect user research with product development, and improve the reliability and cost efficiency of real-world workflows.
What You'll Do
Own agent task success metrics, establish performance baselines, and systematically improve completion rates.
Build rigorous, reproducible evaluation infrastructure grounded in validated user stories and real engineering workflows.
Set per-task token budgets and track the cost of completed workflows.
Work with researchers and engineering domain experts to map, interview about, and validate user workflows.
Translate validated user stories into testable evaluations and prioritize workflow coverage by customer value and technical feasibility.
Make architecture decisions across tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.
Set technical direction for a small team, review designs and code, unblock teammates, and contribute production code.
Collaborate with product, integrations, and customers to align agent behavior with real-world use.
What We're Looking For
At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including 2 or more years building and shipping LLM-based agents that take real-world actions.
Deep experience with LLM application architecture, including model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration.
Strong Python skills and familiarity with function calling, tool APIs, tracing or observability, and evaluation tooling.
Experience building benchmarks for task completion, cost efficiency, and failure analysis.
Hands-on technical leadership and code review experience on a small engineering team.
Experience applying AI or LLM tooling to proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software, with background in mechanical engineering, CAD, CAE, PLM, or a related domain.
Familiarity with desktop automation and enterprise workstation constraints is valuable.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.