Six Figure Work

Founding Backend Engineer

Clera

Company websitegetclera.com (Clera, opens in new tab)

Base salary $200K  to $300K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA

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  • LocationSan Francisco, CA
  • WorkplaceOn-site
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (46 min ago) · observed since

About this job

About the Role

Join a small team building an AI-powered personal assistant that communicates across text, email, and phone. As the founding backend engineer, you will own the reliable systems behind its messaging and agent workflows, from design through production operations.

What You'll Do

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

  • Build background agent runtimes that manage concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.

  • Develop scheduling systems for reminders and follow-ups that run reliably in the correct time zone.

  • Improve capacity, performance, and reliability through load testing, database optimization, and infrastructure changes.

  • Own data security and privacy practices, including encrypted credentials, Postgres schemas, migrations, and deletion workflows.

  • Build observability and tracing to measure latency and costs across messages, models, and tools.

  • Establish backend engineering practices and help recruit and mentor future team members while staying hands-on.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial production on-call responsibility.

  • Strong distributed systems experience, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure handling at scale.

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

  • Production experience with TypeScript or Python, Postgres schema design and performance tuning, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure as code.

  • Experience building messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have meaningful costs.

  • Experience with capacity planning, observability, and tracing across distributed services.

  • Hands-on technical leadership and familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows, with the judgment to verify and own shipped code.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

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

Source: Clera on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($200,000) is above 70% of the 4,251 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 146 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,500; the middle half runs from $149,725 to $204,000.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 6, 2026.

This range next to 6 other live Clera roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live Clera roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Founding Backend Engineer (this listing)$200K - $300K
Founding Product Engineer$200K - $250K
Founding Product Engineer$200K - $300K
Founding Engineer$200K - $300K
Founding Enterprise Account Executive$200K - $250K
Founding Product Engineer$200K - $250K
US Founding Engineer$200K - $400K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Clera roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-10-30
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco

Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity is available. Visa sponsorship is not avai

Method
Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.