Founding Product Engineer at Clera in San Francisco, CA

About the Role

We're a small, early-stage team building an AI-driven pricing and monetization platform for B2B companies — helping them move from static, one-off pricing exercises to a continuously improving, data-informed pricing lifecycle. Our platform spans scenario simulation, willingness-to-pay analysis, smart quoting, and real-time deal coaching.

As a Founding Product Engineer, you'll own entire product modules end-to-end — from scoping with customers through architecture, implementation, and iteration. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with leadership and customers, make key architectural decisions, and help establish engineering culture on a small team where every line of code matters. This is a highly hands-on, high-ownership role in San Francisco.

What You'll Do

• Own whole product modules end-to-end: scope requirements with customers, design versioned APIs, build the UI, ship to production, and iterate.
• Design and evolve architecture for agentic AI systems across Slack bots, terminal UIs, web interfaces, and vendor integrations.
• Ensure features are drivable by LLM agents via MCP/FastMCP server endpoints and conversational interfaces.
• Move pricing and business logic off the client into robust backend services to preserve financial fidelity.
• Extend and maintain a typed pricing ontology (Pydantic models for SKU, Proposition, Persona, Pricing, Customer, Contract, Quote, 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 set engineering best practices and culture.
• Treat money-handling code as load-bearing infrastructure; prioritize root-cause analysis for production issues.
• Champion and continuously improve an AI-native SDLC where agents assist with code generation and automated review gates.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of owning and delivering entire product areas at startup or staff-level scope.
• Deep backend expertise: production experience with FastAPI, Python, and MongoDB (or a closely comparable stack).
• Credible full-stack range: ability to ship polished React + TypeScript UI components independently.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous customer problems all the way to shipped features — without a dedicated PM.
• Experience designing REST or GraphQL APIs with clear contracts and versioning strategies.
• Experience building or integrating AI-assisted features and agent-driven workflows (LLM-driven interfaces, tool-calling endpoints, etc.).
• Familiarity with B2B SaaS monetization concepts: pricing models, packaging, quoting, or CPQ.
• High standards for correctness, especially in financial logic.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States — no visa sponsorship available.

Nice to Have

• Experience building MCP servers or tooling specifically for LLM agents.
• Background in billing, CPQ, metering, or pricing systems.
• Experience with data-dense frontend components and/or conversational interfaces.
• Familiarity with data residency requirements, SOC2/GDPR constraints, and compliant development practices.
• Prior experience as a technical founder, co-founder, or very early employee who shipped a 0-to-1 B2B product to paying customers.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $200,000 – $250,000 USD per year
• Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding team role
• Opportunity to shape product strategy, engineering culture, and team growth from the ground up

Location

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. Remote candidates will not be considered. We believe in-person collaboration is core to how we build at this stage.