Founding Engineer
Clera
Apply to this jobAbout the Role
Join a three-person founding team in New York and help build the full-stack systems behind an AI-native financial research terminal focused on the healthcare sector. This is a Founding Engineer role at a Y Combinator–backed seed-stage startup — meaning you'll have real ownership over architecture, product, and reliability from day one.
You'll shape how the company makes its AI agents dependable through reliable tooling, durable execution, and strong observability, working across frontend, data infrastructure, and AI orchestration. The platform processes thousands of automated research jobs daily and serves institutional investors including banks, hedge funds, and asset managers.
What You'll Do
Work across the entire stack to ship frontend features, data pipelines, and agent infrastructure.
Build real-time, customer-facing systems that keep users informed as information changes.
Create internal tools and data pipelines that enable analysts to add sources and maintain sector coverage faster and more reliably.
Improve the tooling and capabilities that make AI agents more reliable and production-ready.
Own projects end to end: inspect data, QA and instrument what you build, ship it, and fix it in production when it breaks.
First day: Add a new information source. First week: Ship improvements to parsing and extraction. First 30 days: Build the company's core data ontology and the first version of a key product surface.
What We're Looking For
Dealbreakers (must-haves):
Demonstrated experience building, shipping, and operating production software systems end-to-end.
Hands-on experience using AI agents or LLM-based systems to accomplish real work in production or substantial projects.
Experience building deterministic software tools and controls used alongside AI agent systems.
US work authorization required — visa sponsorship is not available.
Required skills and experience:
Backend service development with Python and FastAPI (or equivalent Python frameworks) in production.
Database, data pipeline, and data infrastructure experience — relational and analytical data stores.
Experience improving AI agent reliability, observability, or tool design for production agentic workflows.
Frontend development with TypeScript and React, including real-time customer-facing features.
Experience building parsing, extraction, or data reconciliation systems from unstructured or semi-structured sources.
Cloud infrastructure and deployment experience with AWS, Cloudflare, or equivalent platforms.
Nice to have:
Capital markets, financial data, or equity research domain experience.
Experience with modern data stack tools: dbt, Neon, MotherDuck, Turbopuffer, or similar.
Experience building knowledge graphs, ontologies, or structured data models from unstructured information sources.
Our tech stack: Python, FastAPI, DBOS, TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL, Neon, MotherDuck, Turbopuffer, dbt, AWS, Cloudflare.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $150,000 – $175,000 per year
Founding team equity
Outsized scope and ownership from day one
Location
This is an on-site role based in New York, NY. We work in person as a small, high-trust founding team. Remote-only arrangements are not available for this position.
Summary
Build and operate AI-driven financial research platform with full ownership.
Job title
Founding Engineer
Experience level
null
Industry
finance
Location requirements
On-site in New York, NY; no remote work allowed.
Salary
$150k–$175k
Management role
No
Required skills
Preferred skills
Specializations
Structured locations inferred from the posting.
New York, NY, USA