Co-Founder & CTO

Clera

San Francisco Posted November 5, 2026

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On-site Full-time Executive
Job Description

About the Role

Join an early-stage creative AI and advertising company as a full-time technical co-founder and CTO. You will shape technical and research strategy, build a platform that learns from creative workflows and outcomes, and lead the initial engineering and research team.

What You'll Do

  • Set technical and research strategy, evolving existing workflows into a proprietary training and evaluation platform.

  • Build data infrastructure connecting creative briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, critiques, and campaign outcomes.

  • Develop systems to evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.

  • Design budget allocation policies that guide campaigns and support useful data collection.

  • Choose approaches across frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research.

  • Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, campaigns, experimentation, training, and inference.

  • Establish standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.

  • Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team, working directly with creators and brands.

What We're Looking For

  • Substantial experience in AI research or post-training, including hands-on preference or reward modeling, RLHF, reinforcement learning, or evaluation of subjective outputs.

  • Experience shipping products or features used by people, and owning a model, evaluation, or infrastructure program end to end.

  • Strong background in causal inference with observational data, including selection bias, counterfactual or off-policy evaluation, and adaptive experimentation.

  • Experience with production ML infrastructure and ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to business outcomes.

  • Comfort learning from noisy, delayed, or subjective outcomes and a record of recruiting and leading technical talent.

  • Experience with Python and relevant areas such as bandits, sequential allocation, online experimentation, multimodal ML, agents, planning, or hierarchical modeling is valuable.

  • Willingness to commit full-time, work on-site in San Francisco, and take equal co-founder responsibility in an early-stage environment.

Compensation & Benefits

Equity is approximately 28% as a co-founder. Cash compensation is discussed based on circumstances and fit. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

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

Required Skills
fine-tuning A/B testing machine learning recruiting Python
How to apply

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