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Clera

Founding Backend Engineer

Salary

$200K - $300K

Listed in the posting

Pays more than 85% of 218 backend engineer listings in USD.

This job
$200k–$300k
Typical
$210k
Most pay
$185k–$237k
Apply on company site

Benefits

  • Equity

Skills

AI
Cloud
Distributed Systems
Event-driven Architecture
Infrastructure as Code
Observability
PostgreSQL
Python
TypeScript

Full job description

Description

About the Role

Own the backend infrastructure for an AI-powered personal assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will design, operate, and improve reliable systems that ensure messages and scheduled actions work as expected.

What You'll Do

  • Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery tracking.

  • Build an agent runtime for background tasks, handling concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.

  • Implement scheduling for deferred actions and follow-ups that must run reliably in the correct time zone.

  • Plan capacity, load test, optimize databases, and evolve architecture to support substantial traffic growth.

  • Own data security, privacy, Postgres schemas and migrations, and user data deletion workflows.

  • Build observability and tracing across messages, model calls, and tools, and monitor latency and cost.

  • Set backend engineering standards and help grow the engineering team while remaining hands-on.

Location

Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

  • At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including production on-call ownership for systems handling meaningful traffic.

  • Deep experience building and scaling distributed systems, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.

  • Experience scaling systems through rapid growth and making sound technical prioritization decisions.

  • Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning, as well as cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code.

  • Production experience with TypeScript or Python and capacity planning for growing workloads.

  • Experience with messaging, telephony, or other event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have real costs.

  • Experience building observability and tracing that measure latency and cost across distributed components.

  • Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and the ability to verify and take responsibility for generated code.

  • Hands-on technical leadership, a founding-team mindset, and a record of sustained work in a role or deep expertise in a technical domain.

Benefits

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity details are not provided. Visa sponsorship is not available.

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