Senior Software Engineer, Platform
Clera
Apply to this jobAbout the Role
Join the platform team at a fast-growing, venture-backed AI data analytics startup building an agentic data lakehouse that delivers trustworthy answers from messy enterprise data. As a Senior Software Engineer, Platform, you'll help shape the data foundation that powers AI-driven analytics at scale — without heavy schema migrations or data movement. This is a high-impact, zero-to-one opportunity on a small, senior team tackling genuinely hard distributed systems and data engineering challenges.
This role is on-site in New York City. Visa sponsorship is available.
What You'll Do
Agentic Semantic Layer: Build the system that gives AI agents the context to query enterprise data correctly and the guardrails to prove results — the layer that makes AI-generated queries trustworthy enough to stake decisions on.
Distributed Agent Orchestration: Design and implement orchestration systems for agents that interact with the outside world — API integrations, rate limiting, OAuth passthrough, model routing, scheduling, and token optimization.
Agentic Data Engineering: Architect AI-centric ETL pipelines for data lakehouses that make large-scale analytics accessible to organizations with little or no dedicated data engineering resources.
Contribute across infrastructure, backend services, and frontend as needed in a lean, cross-functional team.
What We're Looking For
Must-haves:
4+ years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems.
Strong proficiency in Golang.
Hands-on experience with gRPC / ConnectRPC, Trino, Kubernetes, DuckDB, and PostgreSQL in a distributed data platform environment.
Experience at early-stage startups or building products from zero to one (VC-backed environment a strong plus).
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or comparable practical experience.
Solid CS fundamentals and a track record of owning complex systems end-to-end.
Nice-to-haves:
Experience with data visualization tools, data modeling, and big data technologies.
Familiarity with data warehouse integrations (e.g., BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake).
Comfort stretching into infrastructure or frontend work when the team needs it.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $200,000 – $350,000 USD annually, depending on experience.
Equity participation.
Competitive benefits package.
Location
This is a full-time, on-site role based in New York City, NY. Candidates must be willing and able to work on-site. Visa sponsorship is available.
Summary
Build scalable distributed systems for data lakehouse platform, AI, and data integration.
Job title
Senior Software Engineer, Platform
Experience level
4+ years
Minimum experience
4+ years exp
Industry
software
Location requirements
on-site in New York City, NY, no remote work allowed
Salary
$200k–$350k
Management role
No
Required skills
Preferred skills
Specializations
Structured locations inferred from the posting.
New York, NY, USA