# Founding Engineer at Clera

Founding Engineer at Clera in San Francisco. On-site, full-time, paying $150k–$250k. Posted June 3, 2026.

- Company: Clera
- Location: San Francisco
- Workplace: On-site
- Job type: Full-time
- Pay: $150k–$250k
- Posted: 2026-06-03
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/clera/a0aaad7e-8282-49fd-b580-2ea0abda78df/application
- Source: https://jobmagic.ai/jobs/founding-engineer-clera-1mqkck

## Requirements

- 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience
- Proven experience building real-time or low-latency production systems
- Proficiency in search, ranking algorithms, and related infrastructure
- Experience with data processing pipelines, ML/AI workflows, or data engineering
- Track record of infrastructure and performance optimization at scale
- Prior experience at early-stage startups; comfortable operating with high ambiguity
- Ability to own features end-to-end with cross-functional collaboration (product, design, engineering)
- Strong problem-solving and fast decision-making in fast-paced environments
- You care about how something feels, not just whether it works

## Description

### About the Role

Join a well-funded (Series A/B), stealth-stage consumer tech startup building an AI-powered map and social discovery platform. The product helps people figure out where to go and what to do — combining one of the largest structured indices of real-world places and events with a clever, social product experience.
As a **Founding Engineer**, you'll own problems end-to-end, work directly with founders, and make architectural decisions that shape the core system. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast.

### What You'll Work On

- Search and ranking at massive scale (200M+ places, millions of events)

- Recommendations and personalization of places and events using embeddings, structured data, and social signals

- Real-time infrastructure — chat, presence, and location systems that feel instantaneous

- AI agent pipelines that plan, retrieve, and reason over diverse data sources

- Map display algorithms that determine what deserves attention

- Data pipelines that structure large volumes of unstructured web data for novel product experiences

- Pushing Elasticsearch and vector search to sub-100ms latency across large datasets

### Engineering Tracks

You don't need to fit neatly into one area — most people here won't.
**Application Engineer (Full-Stack)**

- Build fast, expressive interfaces across mobile and web

- Own features end-to-end from UI to backend

- Tools: TypeScript, React, React Native, iOS/Android

**Data / AI Engineer**

- Build the intelligence layer — search, ranking, pipelines, and agent systems

- Design systems that operate over large-scale, messy real-world data

- Tools: Python, TypeScript, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, LLMs, embeddings, retrieval and recommendation systems

### What We're Looking For

- 0–5 years of professional software engineering experience

- Proven experience building real-time or low-latency production systems

- Proficiency in search, ranking algorithms, and related infrastructure

- Experience with data processing pipelines, ML/AI workflows, or data engineering

- Track record of infrastructure and performance optimization at scale

- Prior experience at early-stage startups; comfortable operating with high ambiguity

- Ability to own features end-to-end with cross-functional collaboration (product, design, engineering)

- Strong problem-solving and fast decision-making in fast-paced environments

- You care about *how* something feels, not just whether it works

### Compensation & Benefits

- **Salary:** $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually

- Equity as a founding team member

### Location

- **San Francisco, CA — on-site required**

- Candidates must be located in or willing to relocate to San Francisco

- **No visa sponsorship available** — must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship