clera
Founding Applied AI Engineer
- San Francisco, United States
- Mid
- Posted 08 Nov 2026
About the Role
As the first senior AI hire at an early-stage AI company, you will own the quality and intelligence of its multi-channel marketing agents. You will shape agent architecture, evaluation systems, and learning loops, and help build the AI team as the company grows.
What You'll Do
- Improve the quality of agent-generated content for social channels and articles, using evaluation systems to make quality measurable.
- Improve performance across search engine optimization and generative engine optimization.
- Build feedback loops that help agents learn from real-world results and performance signals.
- Improve production AI infrastructure, agent architecture, model strategy, and supporting data pipelines.
- Help hire and lead the AI team as it grows.
What We're Looking For
- At least 3 years of experience building production ML or AI systems, including recent hands-on work shipping LLM products or agents.
- Experience designing evaluations and learning from outcome signals at scale in search, ranking, recommendations, or related areas.
- Proficiency in TypeScript, including Next.js, and Python for data analysis, evaluations, and model work, with a track record of shipping end to end.
- Production applied AI experience in areas such as LLM reasoning or post-training, generative AI, agentic systems, search, recommendations, algorithms, or machine learning research.
- Experience improving production AI systems and owning work in a startup or small-team environment.
- Background at a leading AI lab or research program, or another achievement demonstrating comparable technical depth.
- Experience with search, ranking, or AI answer engines is valuable. Marketing or go-to-market experience, recommendation systems, algorithms, and reinforcement learning are also relevant.
Compensation & Benefits
Target annual compensation is $180,000 to $230,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.
You apply directly on clera's careers site. See similar jobs