Six Figure Work

All opportunities

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

Apply (opens in new tab)

You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.

  • LocationSan Francisco, CA
  • WorkplaceOn-site
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (1 h ago) · observed since

About this job

About the Role

Own the backend systems behind an AI assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure for message delivery, long-running agent tasks, and scheduled actions.

What You'll Do

  • Design and operate messaging pipelines with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery across communication channels.

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

  • Implement scheduling for future actions, ensuring they run reliably and in the correct time zone.

  • Plan capacity, load-test services, optimize databases, and address bottlenecks as systems scale.

  • Manage data security and privacy, including credential encryption, Postgres schemas and migrations, and data deletion workflows.

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

  • Establish backend engineering practices and help recruit and mentor future team members.

What We're Looking For

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

  • Deep experience with distributed systems, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and production failure modes.

  • A track record of scaling systems through rapid growth and making sound decisions about what to address immediately.

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

  • Experience shipping production software in TypeScript or Python and building reliable messaging or event-driven systems.

  • Experience with capacity planning, observability, distributed tracing, and measuring latency and costs.

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

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.

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

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
Senior Silicon Engineer$200K - $300K
Founding Engineer$200K - $300K
Founding Enterprise Account Executive$200K - $250K
Founding Engineering Lead$200K - $400K
Founding DevOps Engineer$200K - $300K

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
2026-10-14
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco

Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

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.