Founding Backend Engineer

The role

You will own the backend infrastructure for an AI-powered personal assistant. You will design, operate, and improve reliable systems for text, email, and phone communications.

What you will do

• Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications
• Build an agent runtime for background tasks
• Implement scheduling for deferred actions and follow-ups
• Plan capacity, load test, optimize databases, and evolve architecture
• Own data security, privacy, Postgres schemas and migrations, and user data deletion workflows
• Build observability and tracing across messages, model calls, and tools
• Set backend engineering standards and help grow the engineering team

Required qualifications

• At least 4 years of software engineering experience
• Production on-call ownership for systems handling meaningful traffic
• Deep experience building and scaling distributed systems, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery
• Experience scaling systems through rapid growth and making sound technical prioritization decisions
• Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code
• Production experience with TypeScript or Python
• Experience with capacity planning for growing workloads
• Experience with messaging, telephony, or other event-driven systems
• Experience building observability and tracing that measure latency and cost across distributed components
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and the ability to verify and take responsibility for generated code
• Hands-on technical leadership, a founding-team mindset, and a record of sustained work in a role or deep expertise in a technical domain

About the company

clera is building an AI-powered personal assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone.