Founding Engineer, Environments + Data

The role

Build evaluation environments and benchmarks to measure if AI agents can perform real-world company work. This role combines agent evaluation research with production readiness.

What you will do

• Design synthetic company environments with realistic email, records, and files.
• Build graders and evaluation systems for advanced agents.
• Develop benchmarks that correlate with real-world production performance.
• Find and address evaluation failure modes, including reward hacking and benchmark gaming.
• Simulate software tools such as inboxes and CRMs to support agent interactions at scale.

Required qualifications

• Hands-on research experience in synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or model post-training.
• Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents at a frontier AI lab.
• Experience implementing graders or evaluation systems for AI agents.
• At least 1 to 2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup.
• Mid-level or senior engineering or research experience.
• Experience simulating software systems for agent tool use.
• Experience identifying benchmark flaws and detecting and fixing reward hacking in evaluation systems.
• A degree from a highly selective university or an equivalent credential, such as founding a company or participating in a recognized founder program.

Nice to have

• High-level competition experience in mathematics, programming, debate, or games

Benefits

• Base salary of $200,000 to $300,000 annually, with up to $350,000 for exceptional candidates.
• Additional commission-style bonus of up to $200,000 or more tied to the value of delivered environments.
• Meaningful founding equity.

Before you apply

• Visa sponsorship is available.

About the company

clera