Founding Engineer - Full Stack
Company websitegetclera.com (Clera, opens in new tab)
Base salary $150K to $250K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA
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 (3 h ago) · observed since
About this job
About the Role
A Y Combinator-backed AI startup is looking for a Founding Engineer – Full Stack to join a small founding team at the ground floor. The company operates at the intersection of AI research, product, and engineering — building tools that help brands understand and shape how large language models perceive and represent them. This is a rare opportunity to co-define engineering culture and practices from day one in a fast-moving, high-impact environment.
What You'll Do
Own problems end-to-end — from customer insight and product requirements all the way through research and infrastructure.
Maintain a tight feedback loop with customers and the founding team; ship features quickly and iteratively.
Help define and shape the engineering team's culture, patterns, and best practices.
Continuously explore and reinvent how engineering teams work effectively alongside AI agents.
What We're Looking For
Required
1+ years of experience on engineering teams (2+ preferred), including at least one stint longer than 18 months in a strong startup or scale-up environment.
Full-stack proficiency — comfortable owning customer-facing UI through to infrastructure.
Hands-on experience with React, Python, Terraform, and AWS.
Experience building agentic systems or working with LLMs in production.
Strong product sense and design instincts; able to translate customer needs into shippable features.
Startup experience or self-driven personal projects that demonstrate initiative and high agency.
Must be a US citizen or have US work authorization (no visa sponsorship for candidates outside the US).
Nice to Have
Scientific or academic research background.
Direct customer-facing experience in a technical role.
Enthusiasm for adopting AI-powered coding and productivity tools.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually (depending on experience)
Early-stage equity
Visa sponsorship available for eligible candidates
Location
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.
Source: Clera on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($150,000) is above 25% of the 4,300 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site; 121 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $176,000; 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 6, 2026.
This listingFounding Engineer - Full Stack$150K to $250K
Medical AI Researcher$150K to $230K
Head of Marketing$150K to $240K
Founding Product Designer$150K to $250K
Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)$150K to $200K
Senior Member of Technical Staff$150K to $215K
Founding Engineer$150K to $220K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| Founding Engineer - Full Stack (this listing) | $150K - $250K |
| Medical AI Researcher | $150K - $230K |
| Head of Marketing | $150K - $240K |
| Founding Product Designer | $150K - $250K |
| Platform Engineer (Kubernetes) | $150K - $200K |
| Senior Member of Technical Staff | $150K - $215K |
| Founding Engineer | $150K - $220K |
Observed changes
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- First observed on the employer's board
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2026-06-03
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco
- Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually (depending on experience)
- 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.