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 (20 min ago) · observed since

About this job

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.

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.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity details are not provided. 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 71% of the 4,664 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 150 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,500; the middle half runs from $149,100 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 7, 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
Product Engineer, Consumer$200K - $350K
Founding Engineer$200K - $300K
Founding Enterprise Account Executive$200K - $250K
Founding Product Engineer$200K - $250K

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
2026-11-07
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco

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

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.

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