Founding Engineer, Environments + Data
Clera San Francisco, California, United States · $200K–$350K/yr
Technology, Information and Internet · 11-50 employees
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About the role
Design and build synthetic environments and evaluation systems to measure AI agent performance against real-world tasks. Develop benchmarks that correlate with production performance while identifying and mitigating failure modes like reward hacking.
What they look for
Requirements
Requires hands-on research experience in synthetic data, benchmarks, or model post-training, specifically within an AI lab or startup environment. Candidates should possess mid-level to senior engineering experience and a strong academic or founder background.
Benefits
Full description
About the Role
Build evaluation environments and benchmarks that measure whether AI agents can perform real-world company work and meet or exceed human performance. This founding engineering role combines agent evaluation research with production readiness, helping establish reliable evidence of agent capability.
What You'll Do
- Design synthetic company environments with realistic email, records, and files for agents to use over extended periods.
- Build graders and evaluation systems capable of assessing advanced agents, including cases where human reviewers may lack the relevant expertise.
- 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 with enough fidelity to support agent interactions at scale.
What We're Looking For
- Hands-on research experience in synthetic data pipelines, benchmarks, evaluations, or model post-training; this is a research-oriented role, not a pure infrastructure engineering position.
- Experience building environments or benchmarks used to train or evaluate agents at a frontier AI lab, and implementing graders or evaluation systems for AI agents.
- At least 1 to 2 years at a fast-growing or AI-focused startup, plus mid-level or senior engineering or research experience.
- Experience simulating software systems for agent tool use, 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.
- High-level competition experience in mathematics, programming, debate, or games is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $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 is tied to the value of delivered environments. Meaningful founding equity is included. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site five days per week in San Francisco, California, United States.
