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    Co-Founder & CTO

    CleraOn-site - San Francisco, California, United StatesPosted 2026-11-01
    This listing's locations
    On-site - San Francisco, California, United States
    Employment
    Full-time
    Workplace
    On site
    Department: Engineering

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    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.