Founding Engineer

Summary

Clera is seeking a founding engineer to build multi-modal AI agents for the sports and youth-activity industry using React, Next.js, Node.js, and Python. You will own a core product domain end-to-end, working directly with customers to shape the product and optimize agent performance.

About the Role

This is a founding engineering seat on a small, fast-moving team building multi-modal AI agents across voice, SMS, and email for the sports and youth-activity industry. You'll own one of four core domains end-to-end — B2B product, agent quality, family graph infrastructure, or B2C consumer product — and work directly with customers to shape the product without a dedicated PM layer.

What You'll Do

  • Own an entire product domain from architecture to daily production deploys.

  • Join customer calls, synthesize feedback, and make independent product decisions.

  • Build and optimize multi-modal agents targeting sub-500ms voice latency, high SMS response rates, and persistent conversation state across channels.

  • Drive architecture and quality standards for non-deterministic systems, including evals, prompt versioning, guardrails, and drift detection.

  • Work full-stack across React/Next.js frontends, Node.js backends, and Python voice services.

What We're Looking For

  • 3–8 years of full-stack engineering experience shipping 0-to-1 products at high-growth startups, top-tier tech companies, or as a founder.

  • Production proficiency in TypeScript with hands-on experience in Node.js, React, and Next.js.

  • Hands-on production experience with LLM APIs or agent SDKs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, LangGraph, or similar) — not just tutorials or prototypes.

  • Depth in at least one area: production voice/SMS agents, long-running agent state and memory, B2B2C or marketplace product architecture, or agent evals and guardrails.

  • Comfortable making product decisions independently and running customer discovery without PM support.

  • Python experience with real-time voice pipelines (LiveKit, Deepgram, STT/TTS) or evaluation tooling (LLM-as-judge frameworks) is a strong plus.

  • Familiarity with infrastructure tools such as Redis, BullMQ, Vercel, Render, Sentry, or PostHog is a plus.

  • Founder background with demonstrated traction (revenue, funding, or acquisition) and clear learnings from failure is valued but not required.

  • No visa sponsorship available; must be authorized to work in the US.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary $180,000 – $250,000 annually, plus equity. No visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site five days per week in New York City, NY (Chelsea). Remote arrangements are not available for this role.

See also

Software Engineering jobs by country — openings, pay and top skills →

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