Founding Engineer, Environments + Data
Summary
Founding engineer at Clera building AI-agent evaluation environments, benchmarks, and graders — designing synthetic company setups (emails, records, simulated inboxes/CRMs) and detecting reward hacking. Research-oriented, on-site 5 days/week in San Francisco; base $200k–$300k plus up to $200k+ performance bonus and founding equity.
About the Role
Build evaluation environments and benchmarks that measure whether AI agents can perform real-world company work and meet or exceed human performance. This founding engineering role combines agent evaluation research with production readiness, helping establish reliable evidence of agent capability.
What You'll Do
Design synthetic company environments with realistic email, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods.
Build graders and evaluation systems capable of assessing advanced agents, including cases where human reviewers may lack the relevant expertise.
Develop benchmarks that correlate with real-world production performance.
Find and address evaluation failure modes, including reward hacking and benchmark gaming.
Simulate software tools such as inboxes and CRMs with enough fidelity to support agent interactions at scale.
What We're Looking For
Hands-on research experience in synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or model post-training; this is a research-oriented role, not a pure infrastructure engineering position.
Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents at a frontier AI lab, and implementing graders or evaluation systems for AI agents.
At least 1 to 2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup, plus mid-level or senior engineering or research experience.
Experience simulating software systems for agent tool use, identifying benchmark flaws, and detecting and fixing reward hacking in evaluation systems.
A degree from a highly selective university or an equivalent credential, such as founding a company or participating in a recognized founder program.
High-level competition experience in mathematics, programming, debate, or games is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 annually, with up to $350,000 for exceptional candidates. Additional commission-style bonus of up to $200,000 or more is tied to the value of delivered environments. Meaningful founding equity is included. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site five days per week in San Francisco, California, United States.
Skills
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