Clera

Staff Engineer - Agentic AI

Clera
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3 months ago

Base Salary

$160k - $250k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Lead development of the core agent intelligence layer for multi-step workflows across CAD, CAE, and PLM software.
  • Serve as technical lead for a small team of AI engineers, a user researcher, and domain expert contractors.
  • Own the product loop from user-story definition through implementation and benchmarking against real workflows.
  • Define evaluation frameworks, establish baselines, improve task completion metrics, and track token budgets and workflow costs.
  • Build reproducible evaluation infrastructure grounded in validated user stories.
  • Lead user-story mapping and validation through interviews and collaboration with domain experts.
  • Own agent architecture decisions covering tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.
  • Write production code, review designs, unblock the team, and raise engineering standards.
  • Collaborate with integrations, product, and customers during proof-of-concept engagements.

Requirements

  • 7+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years building agentic LLM-based agents for real-world, multi-step workflows.
  • Deep experience designing LLM application architectures, including model selection, context-window management, retrieval strategies, tool-calling frameworks, and orchestration patterns.
  • Strong evaluation and benchmarking experience for agentic systems, including task completion, cost efficiency, and failure-mode analysis.
  • Proven experience shipping AI systems with measurable outcomes rather than demonstrations alone.
  • Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with LLM tooling, function calling, tool-use APIs, tracing and observability tools such as Logfire or LangSmith, and evaluation frameworks.
  • Experience leading a small technical team of 3–6 engineers, setting direction, conducting code reviews, and driving architecture decisions.
  • Preferred: experience with desktop automation, COM, or programmatic application control beyond web APIs.
  • Preferred: background in mechanical engineering, CAD/CAE, PLM, or adjacent industries.
  • Preferred: familiarity with enterprise deployment constraints on locked-down corporate workstations.
  • Preferred: published work or open-source contributions in agentic AI systems.
  • Preferred: experience building or contributing to public benchmarks for AI agents.

Benefits

  • Equity participation in an early-stage Series A company.
  • On-site role in San Francisco, California; not remote.

Tech Stack

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