Staff Software Engineer, AI

Join us at Cleric

We’re building a future where engineers are focused on designing and building products, freeing them from operational toil. We’re starting with an AI-powered SRE agent that remediates issues in production environments autonomously. It uses an LLM-based reasoning engine to react to, interpret, and implement solutions to production issues, even those it's encountering for the first time.

Now is a divine time to join. We're a small group of veterans in AI, software, and infrastructure, backed by a leading AI venture capital firm and Silicon Valley angels. Our product is in production at high-scale technology companies in fintech, ride-hailing, and autonomous vehicles.

About the role

We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer, AI. You will drive the development of our agent. You will be working on the reasoning, learning, and integrations of our SRE agent, and also the underlying runtime and technical architecture of the complete product. You'll help keep engineering standards high, define the experience for our customers, and push the agent to solve increasingly more complex SRE challenges.

What you'll do:

• Build autonomous agents capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks

• Design and implement agent evaluation frameworks to measure performance and reliability

• Develop self-improving systems that can adapt based on feedback and results

• Expand agent observability to resolve day-to-day issues with tool-calling and agent orchestration

You have:

• 6+ years of production software engineering experience with exposure to ML/data science

• You love building tools for fellow engineers. You consider it a craft.

• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and have opinions on how to build robust, scalable, and secure software.

• You’ve operated high-scale distributed infrastructure. You’ve seen it done right, and you’ve seen it gone wrong. Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, microservices, and all the usual suspects.

• You've built complex systems at scale. We use Python, but value experience with systems languages (Rust, C++, Go) or JVM languages (Kotlin, Scala).

• You are obsessed with generative AI and have a background in building ML/AI systems.

• You are a methodical thinker and try to understand the big picture

• You challenge assumptions and propose pragmatic solutions

Nice to have:

• Prior experience building autonomous agents

• Familiarity with LLM tool-calling, function-calling, and agentic frameworks

• Previous startup experience

How we work

• Small teams, big impact: We believe that small teams can deliver great products.

• Culture matters: We value radical candor in a positive and inclusive work environment.

• In-person collaboration: We believe in working closely to deliver the best results.

• AI-first approach: We don't simply build AI products; we augment ourselves with it.

Interview process (you'll meet most of the team via the process)

1. Intro Call

   • Discuss your experience, the company, product, and the role

   • Lightning tech screen (10 mins) to swap ideas on engineering practices.

2. Software Engineering Session (1 hour)

   • Collaboratively build an application

   • Focus on practical software engineering, not algorithm challenges

3. System Design Session (90 mins)

   • Work through a system design problem relevant to your daily work

4. Bar Raiser (60 mins)

   • Product thinking

   • Engineering practices