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Job Description

About the Role

This is a founding-level engineering role at a seed-stage flexible workforce marketplace, sitting directly alongside the CTO to own the entire agent layer end-to-end. You will set the patterns for how every agent in the platform gets built, measured, and improved, working on production systems with real-world consequences at scale. This is a rare opportunity to define the architecture of agentic software in a domain where no one has fully solved it yet.

What You'll Do

  • Own the full agent layer: context engineering, self-learning systems, evals, the agent harness, and the meta-harness.

  • Build a compounding knowledge base of undocumented systems so that each new integration gets faster and better than the last.

  • Design and ship self-healing workflows where agents detect, diagnose, and autonomously recover from production failures.

  • Build and maintain the meta-harness that lets the team create, evaluate, and evolve new agents in days.

  • Set engineering patterns that every future agent on the platform follows.

  • Help hire and grow the agentic engineering team over time.

  • Work as a peer to the founding team and experiment relentlessly.

What We're Looking For

  • 2 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, with a hands-on individual contributor focus.

  • Completed or in-progress engineering, computer science, or quantitative degree from a strong technical university.

  • Prior experience at an early-stage, venture-backed startup, whether as a founder or an early engineer. A background exclusively in large enterprises or big tech does not fit this role.

  • Proven experience building agentic software within the past year. This field moves fast and recent hands-on work is essential.

  • Experience building context or self-learning systems that improve agent performance through accumulated knowledge.

  • Experience building autonomous failure detection, diagnosis, or self-healing production workflows.

  • Deep understanding of agent tracing, evals, and eval-driven iteration.

  • Comfortable building reusable agent harnesses or meta-harnesses for rapidly creating and evolving agents.

  • Strong implementation focus: you ship working systems in production, not research prototypes.

  • Proficiency with TypeScript and PostgreSQL; familiarity with LLMs and agent frameworks is expected.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $150,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available where an O-1 visa is a realistic path.

Location

On-site five days a week in San Francisco, CA. Candidates currently based elsewhere in the US are welcome with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco.

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  • Role Founding Engineer - Agentic
  • Experience 3-4 years
  • Work type On-site
  • Location United States
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Clera
AI & Machine Learning · 500+ Members · United States

Clera is an AI recruiting platform that introduces candidates directly to hiring managers at the companies they want to work for.

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Job Overview

Approx. salary range

283K – 291K

Our estimate — this employer did not publish a salary

Our estimate, not the employer’s. Worked out from the middle half of 16 comparable roles on Neural Jobs that did publish a salary, in the same field, country and experience band. The real figure for this job may be different.

Eligibility
United States Right to work in the United States required.
Workplace
On-site
Job Posted:
6 days ago
Job Type
Full Time
Experience
3-4 years

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