Founding Infrastructure Engineer
Clera
- Location
- Onsite (San Francisco, California)
- Compensation
- $175k - $300k/yr
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
About the Role
Clera is a seed-stage startup building an AI career agent platform. This role involves owning the infrastructure and platform layer, including integration runtimes and agent infrastructure, while working directly with the founding team to ship production-ready systems.
Skills
Benefits
- Visa sponsorship
Full job details
About the Role
This is the first infrastructure hire at a seed-stage gig economy and flexible staffing platform, working directly with the CTO as a true founding team member. You will own the entire infra and platform layer from day one, with a clear path to leading the infrastructure team as it grows. The work directly shapes how integration runtimes and AI coding agents run reliably at scale in production.
What You'll Do
Own and evolve a mini cloud platform for integration runtime: durable execution, sandboxed isolation, and self-healing systems.
Build and operate the agent infrastructure that supports coding agents writing, testing, and deploying integration code at scale in production.
Design and maintain full observability across logs, metrics, and tracing for every integration and agent run.
Ship a self-hostable, single-tenant deployment of the platform as a first-class product.
Set the engineering patterns and standards that every future infrastructure hire will build on.
Work as a peer to the founding team, shipping to production constantly.
Help hire and, within roughly a year, grow into leading the infrastructure team.
What We're Looking For
3 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years in a fast-moving, high-growth startup environment.
Hands-on experience operating, scaling, and debugging Kubernetes in production.
End-to-end ownership of cloud infrastructure or a platform, not just contributing to one.
Practical cloud infrastructure background rather than primarily data infrastructure experience.
Strong observability design skills across logs, metrics, and tracing for production systems.
Comfortable using AI coding agents effectively while maintaining rigorous production engineering judgment.
Experience building self-hostable, single-tenant product deployments is a strong plus.
Prior experience at a venture-backed startup or as a founder; a career spent only at large enterprises does not fit this role.
Strong computer science fundamentals from a rigorous technical degree program.
Fluency in TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Docker.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $175,000 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, United States. Candidates based elsewhere in the US are welcome with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco.