Senior Engineer - Backend
- Location
- San Francisco
- Workplace
- Remote
- Employment
- Full-time
- Compensation
- $190k – $300k + equity
- Visa
- Sponsorship for Exceptional Candidates
About this role
What we're looking for
We're looking for a generalist, high-agency engineer with 5+ years of backend experience building customer-facing products. You should have startup DNA — experience at top-tier startups (Series B or earlier) or as a founder — and a product mindset that ties technical decisions to business impact. We need someone who questions the "why," drives projects end-to-end without oversight, and thrives in early-stage ambiguity with high ownership and fast iteration.
What you'll do
- Own and ship product features end-to-end — from problem scoping through backend implementation to production
- Design and ship LLM agents that reason over large, messy, real-world organizational data, and make them reliable enough to trust
- Make key technical decisions across the product and backend — architecture, data modeling, APIs, tooling — and set the engineering quality bar
- Operate with full autonomy; in a team this small, your judgment directly shapes the product, the codebase, and the company
- Own high-risk, high-impact projects in a fire-and-forget work style with minimal hand-holding
- Shape the product direction alongside the founding team; translate customer needs into technical solutions
- Work closely with the founding team to support growing client engagements ranging from hundreds to thousands of employees
What happens next
Skip the application pile. Clera gets you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
Clera pitches you to the company
Clera writes the intro, sends it to the founder, and handles the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, Clera gets the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
Engineering team operates with extreme autonomy and ownership, with each engineer expected to independently own high-risk, high-impact projects
Team explicitly optimizes for senior engineers with founding experience or entrepreneurial backgrounds who can set technical direction without hand-holding
Culture is fast-paced, iterative, and startup-native
Team values high agency and high ownership, with engineers defining problems themselves and driving solutions end-to-end
Everyone on the team is expected to have a sophisticated relationship with AI and use it as a force multiplier while maintaining strong first-principles thinking
Team values methodical problem solving and diagnosis before prescription — understanding the actual problem before jumping to solutions
First-principles thinking is core to how the team operates
Team ships production systems at startup speed while maintaining high engineering standards
Distributed across San Francisco and Toronto, with some engineers working remotely and flying in periodically for in-person collaboration
At ~17 people total, every engineer's decisions have immediate, visible impact on the product and the company's trajectory
Team works closely with leadership and investors from strong engineering organizations
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