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Founding Backend Engineer

CleraSan Francisco, CA

$200K – $300Kfrom listing textEngineeringFull time4+ yrs
Source-verified: read directly from this employer's own ashby job board, not a repost.On-sitePosted (today)Last verified (today)

At a glance

Location
San Francisco, CA
Workplace
On-site
Pay
$200K – $300K (from listing text)
Employment type
Full time
Experience
4+ years
Education
No degree requirement stated
Job family
Engineering
Seniority
Not stated
Posted by employer
22 October 2026
Last verified open
23 October 2026
Region and country
CA, US
Team
Engineering
Listed via
Ashby

What the employer wrote

ABOUT THE ROLE

Build and operate the backend for an AI assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will own systems where reliable, timely message delivery is essential and help shape the team's engineering standards.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery tracking.

- Build the background agent runtime, including concurrency controls, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.

- Develop scheduling systems for future actions that must run reliably and in the correct time zone.

- Plan capacity, load-test services, optimize databases, and make architectural improvements to support growth.

- Own security and privacy practices, including credential encryption, Postgres schemas and migrations, and data deletion workflows.

- Build observability and cost tracking that traces messages through downstream model and tool calls.

- Set backend engineering standards and help recruit and mentor a growing engineering team while remaining hands-on.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial production on-call responsibility.

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

- Experience scaling production systems through rapid growth and making sound tradeoffs 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 systems in TypeScript or Python.

- Background in messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have real costs.

- Experience with observability, distributed tracing, capacity planning, and measuring latency and cost.

- Hands-on technical leadership and familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows, including verifying and owning generated code.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

LOCATION

Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.

Where this record came from

Read from Clera's own Ashby job board on , and last confirmed still open on . The employer published it on 22 October 2026. Jobsearch.ing did not write, edit or rank this posting, and does not vet the employer. View the original posting.

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