Staff Engineer, Agentic AI at Clera

About the Role

Lead the development of agent intelligence that helps mechanical engineers complete complex, multi-step workflows across desktop engineering software. As a hands-on technical lead on a small AI engineering team, you will shape the agent architecture, connect user research with product development, and improve the reliability and cost efficiency of real-world workflows.

What You'll Do

• Own agent task success metrics, establish performance baselines, and systematically improve completion rates.

• Build rigorous, reproducible evaluation infrastructure grounded in validated user stories and real engineering workflows.

• Set per-task token budgets and track the cost of completed workflows.

• Work with researchers and engineering domain experts to map, interview about, and validate user workflows.

• Translate validated user stories into testable evaluations and prioritize workflow coverage by customer value and technical feasibility.

• Make architecture decisions across tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.

• Set technical direction for a small team, review designs and code, unblock teammates, and contribute production code.

• Collaborate with product, integrations, and customers to align agent behavior with real-world use.

What We're Looking For

• At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including 2 or more years building and shipping LLM-based agents that take real-world actions.

• Deep experience with LLM application architecture, including model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration.

• Strong Python skills and familiarity with function calling, tool APIs, tracing or observability, and evaluation tooling.

• Experience building benchmarks for task completion, cost efficiency, and failure analysis.

• Hands-on technical leadership and code review experience on a small engineering team.

• Experience applying AI or LLM tooling to proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software, with background in mechanical engineering, CAD, CAE, PLM, or a related domain.

• Familiarity with desktop automation and enterprise workstation constraints is valuable.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.