Clera
Founding Engineer
San Francisco
No sponsorship$160k-$270kDetected 3 days ago
RustDistributed SystemsGitAgentic AIResearch
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.
Responsibilities
- Own and ship core infrastructure: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems components
- Proven track record of architectural decision-making - you've written design docs and shipped the code in the same sprint
- 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.
Requirements
- 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
- Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook
- experience in small, high-ownership founding or early-stage teams
Nice to have
- Open source contributions in systems-level projects
- Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role
- Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
- Free daily meals in the office
- Periodic team offsites
Skills
- you reason from first principles, not just frameworks
Compensation
- Salary: $160,000 - $270,000 per year
Benefits
- Wellness programs and top-tier hardware & software
- Flexible PTO focused on enabling deep work
- 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
Company info
- 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.
Visa & Work Authorization
- Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
This listing is sourced directly from Clera's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.