{"id":1347171,"url":"https://alion.io/job/clera-founding-engineer-104","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":2706,"name":"Clera","domain":"getclera.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/clera","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":true,"employer_type":"agency","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":80,"open_postings":30,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":6,"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-27T17:13:55Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-27","last_verified_at":"2026-09-28T23:27:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"About the Role\nThis is a founding engineering position at an early-stage AI/ML startup building systems that help hardware and electrical engineering firms move faster by turning decades of accumulated domain knowledge into intelligent, compounding technology. You will partner directly with the CTO to own the full technical stack, from architecture to production, inside real customer programs at defense and medical device companies.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign and build the core system architecture that integrates AI agents with CAD, CAE, and PLM tools while meeting the security requirements of defense and medical customers.\n\nOwn end-to-end engineering execution including design decisions, production delivery, reliability, observability, evaluation suites, regression testing, and on-call operations.\n\nShip your first production AI workflow into a live customer program, one that engineers use and depend on weekly.\n\nBuild evaluation and training loops that improve the system from simulation runs, test data, engineer corrections, and field outcomes, including reinforcement learning grounded in real physics.\n\nSpend time embedded with engineers at partner companies to understand where the system fails against real deadlines, and translate those learnings into platform capabilities.\n\nExpand the platform across multiple operating companies with measurable cycle-time reduction on at least one product line.\n\nHelp build and mentor the small engineering team that grows around you.\n\nWhat We're Looking For\n4 or more years shipping software to production, including systems that real customers depended on daily.\n\nProven experience putting AI into production: shipped LLM agent workflows that call real tools, handle failures, and are held to rigorous evaluation suites.\n\nStrong Python and backend or ML systems engineering skills; comfort picking the right tool for the job.\n\nExperience designing system architecture for agent orchestration and tool integration.\n\nAbility to design rigorous evaluations and judge honestly when the answer is retrieval, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or plain software.\n\nProduction delivery experience including observability, regression testing, and on-call operations.\n\nStrong CS fundamentals, ideally from a rigorous academic background.\n\nPrior experience at a high-growth or early-stage company in AI, industrial software, autonomous systems, or developer infrastructure is a strong plus.\n\nExperience with reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, simulation, robotics, physical-world AI, or domain-specific tools such as CAD, CAE, or EDA is a bonus.\n\nComfortable earning trust with domain experts on a shop floor as well as with technical leadership.\n\nUS citizen or permanent resident; visa sponsorship is not available.\n\nWilling to travel to partner operating companies as needed.\n\nCompensation & Benefits\nBase salary: $150,000 to $220,000 USD annually. Equity participation is expected at the founding engineer level. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.\nLocation\nFull-time, on-site in New York City, NY. Travel to partner operating companies is a regular part of the role.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3131,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"New York","iso":null,"kind":"city"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Science & Engineering"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-27T17:14:06Z"}],"liveness":{"score":42,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.417,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":6,"reasons":["conf:1","agency","stale_co","wave","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/clera-founding-engineer-104","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/clera-founding-engineer-104.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T23:59:06Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1355,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":3645,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}