Founding Engineer - Agentic
Clera · San Francisco, CA
FULL-TIME
Posted Sep 13, 2026
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.
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.
Additional Details
- City
- San Francisco
- State
- California
- Country
- US
Apply and matching require a free OVN account. Browse listings anytime without signing in.