Founding Product Engineer

About the company

Clera is a talent-matching platform that replaces traditional job applications by connecting candidates and hiring teams through curated introductions.

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE We're a small, fast-moving team building an AI-driven pricing and monetization platform that helps B2B companies continuously optimize their pricing strategy — from packaging and willingness-to-pay analysis to deal quoting, discount governance, and CPQ workflows. We're looking for a Founding Product Engineer to own entire product modules end-to-end, work directly with customers, and help set the technical and engineering culture of the company. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the founding-team level. You'll collaborate closely with customers, product, and leadership — and be expected to take ambiguous problems all the way to shipped, production-quality features. Financial logic correctness, AI-native tooling, and clean API design are first-class priorities here. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own whole product modules end-to-end: scope with customers, design versioned APIs, build the UI, ship, and iterate. - Design and evolve architecture for agentic AI systems spanning Slack bots, terminal UIs, web interfaces, and vendor integrations. - Ensure product features are drivable by LLM agents via MCP/FastMCP servers and conversational interfaces. - Move pricing and business logic off the client into backend services to preserve financial fidelity. - Extend and maintain a typed pricing ontology (Pydantic models for SKUs, propositions, personas, pricing structures, etc.). - Lead technical discussions and architectural reviews to keep systems robust, extensible, and secure. - Establish testing, observability, deployment, and performance monitoring practices for AI-driven features. - Mentor peers, influence product strategy, and shape engineering culture and best practices. - Treat money-handling code as load-bearing infrastructure; prioritize root-cause analysis for production issues. - Adopt and improve an AI-native SDLC where agents assist with code and automated review gates. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Required - 8+ years of engineering experience with strong full-stack skills and proven ownership of product areas at startup or staff engineer scope. - Deep backend expertise — experience with FastAPI, Python, and MongoDB or a comparable modern stack. - Credible frontend skills with React and TypeScript; able to ship a clean, polished UI independently. - Track record of taking ambiguous customer problems to shipped features without a dedicated PM. - Experience designing and building REST or GraphQL APIs with clear contracts and versioning. - High standards for correctness, especially around financial or pricing logic. - Must be legally authorized to work in the US — no visa sponsorship is available. Nice to Have - Interest or hands-on experience in B2B monetization: pricing models, packaging, quoting, billing, or CPQ. - Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Cursor, Copilot) and experience integrating LLM agent tooling or MCP-like servers. - Prior experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Salary: $200,000 – $250,000 USD annually - Early-employee equity commensurate with founding-team scope - Opportunity to shape product, architecture, and engineering culture from the ground up LOCATION This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Remote or fully distributed arrangements are not available for this position.