This is a true co-founder seat, not a senior hire, at an early-stage creative AI and marketing technology company with a live product already generating rich preference data from real brand campaigns. You will own the entire technical and research vision, from today's creator workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative AI agents. The role exists because the data and research opportunity here is unlike anything available at larger organizations.
Own technical and research strategy, defining the path from current workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform.
Build data infrastructure that connects briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, critique, and campaign outcomes.
Design systems that evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
Develop the allocation policy that directs campaign budget and simultaneously shapes dataset collection.
Make core decisions on frontier model usage, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research directions.
Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team.
Work directly with creators, brands, and investors as a company representative.
Hands-on experience building preference or reward models, including RLHF, reward modeling, ranking subjective outputs, or evaluation systems.
Strong grounding in causal inference on observational data: selection bias, off-policy or counterfactual evaluation, adaptive experimentation, or validating a cheap proxy against an expensive delayed outcome.
Production ML at scale in ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to real business outcomes.
Experience with bandits, sequential allocation, or online experimentation in production.
Track record shipping real products or features used by real people, not research that stayed in papers or prototypes.
Background at a frontier AI lab or research organization of comparable caliber is a strong positive signal.
Experience with multimodal generation, agents, planning systems, or latent-variable modeling is valued.
Proven ability to recruit and lead strong technical talent and own programs end to end.
Prior founder experience is a plus.
Ready to commit fully (6 to 7 days per week) as an equal co-founder, comfortable with early-stage uncertainty and full ownership of technical strategy.
Salary: $250,000 to $500,000 annually, discussed based on circumstances and fit.
Equity: Approximately 28% as an equal co-founder.
Visa sponsorship: Not available.
On-site, full-time in San Francisco, CA.
Job details are sourced from the employer's original posting.
Open job postingAbout the company
Clera is a fast-growing AI start-up that is rethinking the way top talents find their next dream jobs. By automating and optimizing processes within the $600B global headhunting industry.