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Clera

Founding Engineering Lead

New York, United States

Location
New York, United States
Work
Remote
Employment
Full-time
Level
Lead / staff
Function
Engineering
Pay
$200K – $400K a year
Posted
3 days ago

Pay and the market here

The top of this role’s range, $400K a year, is 40% above the median of $285K for lead / staff engineering jobs in New York (middle half $240K – $340K, 657 jobs that state pay).

3,694 engineering jobs open in New York: 12% remote, 739 posted in the last 30 days.

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About the role

About the Role

Lead hands-on engineering and applied machine learning at an early-stage B2B SaaS company. You will shape the platform architecture and technical roadmap with the founders while leading a small engineering pod.

What You'll Do

  • Build and lead a pod of engineers, supporting their growth, performance, and hiring while shipping critical work yourself.
  • Own platform architecture and make build-versus-buy and infrastructure decisions.
  • Set engineering standards, code review criteria, release practices, definitions of done, and on-call policies.
  • Lead technical design and initial implementation of new initiatives.
  • Assess applied machine learning research and determine what is suitable for production systems.
  • Partner with the CTO on product direction, model strategy, and machine learning approaches.

What We're Looking For

  • Typically 5 to 8 years of engineering experience, with exceptional candidates considered from 4 to 5 years.
  • Experience in an AI-native company, with technical leadership or ownership that helped build and support an engineering team.
  • Hands-on experience training and deploying machine learning models in commercial production products, beyond integrating language model APIs.
  • End-to-end ownership of technical architecture, infrastructure decisions, and engineering standards.
  • Recent experience personally shipping production software, plus a record of stable engineering tenure.
  • Strong applied machine learning judgment, including classical methods and current approaches to transformers and agent applications.
  • Comfort with ambiguity, inherited code, hands-on development, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $200,000 to $400,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in New York, New York.

Source

Posted by Clera on their own hiring page, jobs.ashbyhq.com. OptiTalent shows it as published, read 13 Nov 2026 00:52 UTC; the original is the reference.

View the original ad ↗

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