Founding Engineer
Clera
About the Role
A seed-stage AI infrastructure company is hiring 2-3 Founding Engineers to work on the core of a graph-native context and memory platform purpose-built for AI agents. This is not a feature factory role. You will own significant, high-impact pieces of the platform - query engine, storage layer, graph internals - and make architecture decisions that will shape the product for the next decade. You will work directly with the founding team, and your name will be on the design docs and the pull requests in the same week.
The company builds a GraphDB on object storage with semantic search, git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution - giving AI agents persistent, structured, and temporally aware context. Backed by prominent investors and researchers in the AI space, the team is small, high-conviction, and building foundational infrastructure that real AI agents depend on in production.
What You'll Do
Own and ship core infrastructure: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems components
Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team
Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category
Participate in architecture reviews and make hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences
Help raise the technical ceiling as the team grows - influencing roadmap, hiring bar, and engineering culture
What We're Looking For
Required:
3+ years of systems programming and distributed systems development
Proficiency in Rust and/or Go at a production level
Experience designing and implementing core infrastructure components such as query execution engines, storage layers, or graph internals
Proven track record of architectural decision-making - you've written design docs and shipped the code in the same sprint
Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook; experience in small, high-ownership founding or early-stage teams
Strong CS fundamentals: you reason from first principles, not just frameworks
Nice to Have:
Experience building or scaling distributed databases, storage infrastructure, or graph systems
Open source contributions in systems-level projects
Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role
Recurse Center background or equivalent self-directed deep technical learning
Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $160,000 - $270,000 per year
Meaningful early-stage equity - the team is committed to builders owning a real piece of what they create
Learning budget: books, courses, conferences, and compute for personal experiments
Wellness programs and top-tier hardware & software
Free daily meals in the office
Flexible PTO focused on enabling deep work
Periodic team offsites
Location
This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. The team works closely together in person - co-location is a core part of how this team operates.