
Founding Applied AI Engineer
Clera · San Francisco · Onsite
- Internet & E-commerce
- 11–50 employees
- San Francisco
Mixed hiring record · median 4 days open
Hiring signal
Actively hiring
Posted yesterday · still listed on the employer's own board · How we score
All reasons
- This role has been posted 4 times
- 34% of this employer's openings are over 60 days old
In its favour
- Posted yesterday
- Still listed on the employer's own board
- Publishes a salary range
About the Role
As the first senior AI hire at an early-stage AI marketing company, you will own the quality and intelligence of its multi-channel marketing agents. You will shape the agent architecture, evaluation systems, and learning loops, while helping build the AI team.
What You'll Do
- Improve agent output and content quality across social platforms and article writing, using evaluation systems to measure results.
- Improve search engine optimization and generative engine optimization performance.
- 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 building production machine learning or AI systems, with recent hands-on experience shipping LLM products or agents.
- Experience designing evaluations and using outcome signals at scale in search, ranking, recommendations, or related domains.
- Strong TypeScript, including Next.js, and Python skills for data analysis, evaluations, and model work, with a track record of shipping end to end.
- Production experience in applied AI, such as LLM reasoning or post-training, generative AI, agentic systems, search, recommendation systems, algorithms, or machine learning research.
- Experience building feedback loops and improving AI infrastructure, agent architecture, or model strategy in production.
- Experience owning and shipping work in a startup or small team, plus strong research or applied AI achievements.
- Search, ranking, or AI answer engine experience is valuable. Marketing or go-to-market experience is a plus; recommendation systems, algorithms, and reinforcement learning are also relevant backgrounds.
Compensation & Benefits
Annual base 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.
Skills
More jobs at Clera
All 153- Senior Data ScientistClera · Remote · EUR 75,000–100,000/yrtoday
- Senior Software EngineerClera · Remote · EUR 70,000–95,000/yrtoday
- Senior Data EngineerClera · Remote · EUR 70,000–95,000/yrtoday
- Senior Product EngineerClera · Munich · EUR 60,000–90,000/yrtoday
- AI Infrastructure / Product EngineerClera · Remote · USD 180,000–260,000/yrtoday
Similar roles
- Remote role Software Architect - Artificial IntelligenceSyntricate Technologies · Columbia, SCtoday
- Staff Platform EngineerMotive · Seattle · USD 181,000–220,000/yrtoday
- Software Engineer - MonitoringMotive · Seattle · USD 164,000–200,000/yrtoday
- Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer - RecommendationsSoundCloud · New York · USD 280,000–325,000/yrtoday
- Senior Full-Stack Engineer - Artist SuccessSoundCloud · New York · USD 160,000–190,000/yrtoday
- Senior Applied AI Engineer - OperateVi · United Statestoday