Founding Software Engineer
Company: Client vacancy via Clera (anonymised) | Industry: AI
Location: San Francisco, United States | Work Policy: Hybrid
Experience Required: 0-5 years
Salary Range: USD 150,000 - 300,000
COMPANY OVERVIEW
About: Our client is an AI company, team size 1-10.
ROLE DETAILS
ROLE SUMMARY
Join as a founding software engineer responsible for building cloud infrastructure and backend systems that transform robotics research into a reliable, production-grade product. This generalist role emphasizes backend work (~75%) with ownership of frontend experiences, APIs, data pipelines, and architectural decisions while collaborating directly with research, robotics, and product teams.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design and deploy cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure using infrastructure-as-code and automated deployments
- Build serverless APIs, containerized services, and event-driven workflows optimized for latency, throughput, reliability, and cost
- Implement authentication, authorization, and secrets management (OAuth/OIDC, API keys, RBAC, tenant isolation)
- Model, optimize, and manage relational databases, object storage, and caches with indexing, migrations, and disaster recovery
- Ingest and process sensor streams, 3D spatial data, telemetry, and model outputs with edge-to-cloud connectivity
- Build product foundations (organization/project/device management, configuration, usage tracking, onboarding) and integrate ML components into APIs/workflows
- Establish production readiness practices: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, security controls, incident diagnostics
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
Experience: 0-5 years in backend engineering or related roles; demonstrated experience operating cloud services and infrastructure as code
Technical Skills:
- Python or TypeScript (or Go, or Rust) for backend development
- Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code practices
- APIs and services design (serverless, containerized, event-driven)
- Authentication/authorization and secrets management (OAuth/OIDC, RBAC)
- Relational databases, object storage, caches; data modeling and migrations
- Robotics/spatial data processing, telemetry, or edge-to-cloud data workflows (preferred)
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Frontend experience with React/TypeScript and end-to-end feature ownership (API to UI)
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Salary: USD 150,000 - 300,000
OTE: Not disclosed
Visa Sponsorship: Not Specified
Referral Bonus: Not Specified
Other Benefits: Founding equity (significant)
ROLE CHARACTERISTICS
Seniority Level: Entry to Mid (founding engineer with broad scope; expects rapid growth and ownership)
Role Type: Individual Contributor
Growth Stage Impact: Startup / Founding phase
Technical Focus: Full-stack with backend emphasis (cloud infrastructure, APIs, data pipelines)# Senior Backend / Full Stack Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site)
Compensation: $100K–$250K base + meaningful equity
Employment: Full-time
Visa: H-1B sponsorship, OPT, and CPT support
## About the company
At the company, we're building the infrastructure that connects AI agents to the world.
We believe the next generation of software won't just live in browsers and apps. AI agents will interact with people across messaging, voice, and the interfaces billions already use.
The company provides the messaging infrastructure powering some of the world's leading personal AI agents. Our APIs and SDKs make it possible for developers to build, deploy, and scale agent experiences across iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and beyond.
In just six months of commercialization, we've grown to millions in ARR and become a critical infrastructure provider in the rapidly emerging agent ecosystem.
## The Role
We're looking for a Senior Backend / Full Stack Engineer who can own complex engineering problems from architecture to production.
You'll work on the systems behind the company: distributed messaging infrastructure, developer-facing APIs, internal platforms, and the tools that make building on the company feel effortless.
This is not a role where you'll simply implement tickets from a specification.
We expect engineers to understand the problem, challenge assumptions, make technical decisions, write production-quality code, and own the outcome.
You'll have significant autonomy and direct influence over the architecture, product, and engineering culture of the company.
## What You'll Do
- Build production infrastructure. Design and operate highly available backend services that handle large-scale, real-time messaging workloads.
- Own systems end-to-end. Take responsibility for projects from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, observability, and ongoing operation.
- Design exceptional developer experiences. Build intuitive APIs, SDKs, and developer tools with thoughtful abstractions and attention to detail.
- Solve distributed systems challenges. Work on reliability, concurrency, fault tolerance, message delivery, queuing, and consistency across complex systems.
- Build across the stack. Contribute to backend services, developer dashboards, internal tooling, and infrastructure whenever the problem requires it.
- Drive technical decisions. Evaluate tradeoffs, simplify architecture, and make pragmatic decisions that balance engineering quality with execution speed.
- Leverage AI-native development. Use AI coding agents to increase engineering leverage while maintaining a deep understanding of the code, architecture, and operational consequences.
- Raise the engineering bar. Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, incident analysis, and continuously improving how we build software.
## What We're Looking For
Required
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience building and operating production backend systems.
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript / Node.js, with experience in at least one additional backend language such as Go, Rust, or Swift.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, networking, databases, and API design.
- Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis or other NoSQL systems, AWS, k8s, and cloud infrastructure.
- Experience building and maintaining high-availability services, including observability, incident response, and performance optimization.
- Ability to independently design, implement, deploy, and maintain complex systems.
- Strong engineering judgment. You understand not only how to build something, but why a particular design is appropriate.
- Experience using AI coding tools effectively, with the ability to critically evaluate and fully understand AI-generated code.
- Strong ownership, clear communication, and the ability to collaborate in a fast-moving team.
Nice to Have
- Experience with Swift, Rust, React, Next.js, or Terraform.
- Experience building developer infrastructure, APIs, SDKs, or platform products.
- Experience with high-throughput messaging, event-driven systems, WebSockets, gRPC, or real-time communication infrastructure.
- Experience with Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, or production observability.
- Experience operating systems at meaningful scale with demanding reliability requirements.
- Previous experience at an early-stage startup or shipping products independently.
- Strong product taste and an appreciation for elegant developer experiences.
## How We Work
Ownership over task completion. We believe engineers should own outcomes, not just assigned tickets. Every engineering problem has a clear owner responsible for driving it to completion.
Small teams, high agency. We avoid unnecessary hierarchy and process. Engineers are trusted to make decisions, challenge existing approaches, and move quickly.
Speed with engineering judgment. We move fast, but we care deeply about reliability, maintainability, and simplicity. Good engineering means understanding the tradeoffs behind every decision.
AI-native engineering. AI has fundamentally changed how software is written. We care less about how much code you type and more about your ability to understand systems, make excellent decisions, and deliver meaningful results.
Product quality matters. Even infrastructure is a product. We believe great APIs and developer tools should feel as thoughtfully designed as great consumer software.
## Why the company?
- Real scale, real impact. Build infrastructure already serving production AI applications and developers.
- Exceptional ownership. Shape core architecture and product decisions instead of working on a narrow slice of a large organization.
- High engineering leverage. Work with a small team where individual contributions directly influence the company's trajectory.
- Frontier of AI infrastructure. Help define how AI agents communicate with people and the services around them.
- Meaningful equity. Join early enough to have substantial ownership in what we're building.
---
*This is a client vacancy represented by Clera, not employment at Clera. Client identity is withheld at this stage; Clera introduces candidates directly.*
