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Co-Founder & CTO

San FranciscoFull-timePosted Oct 10, 2026

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join an AI-powered creative advertising startup as a full-time technical co-founder and CTO. You will own the technical and research direction, building on an existing product to develop systems that learn from creative work and its real-world performance.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

  • Set the technical and research strategy, from current workflows through a proprietary training and evaluation platform.
  • Build data infrastructure connecting creative briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, feedback, and campaign outcomes.
  • Develop systems to evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
  • Design allocation policies that direct campaign budgets and inform data collection.
  • Choose where to apply frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research.
  • Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, campaigns, experimentation, model training, and inference.
  • Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
  • Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team, while working directly with creators and brands.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • At least 3 years of relevant experience, with hands-on work building preference or reward models, including RLHF, ranking, or evaluation systems.
  • Experience with causal inference on observational data, such as selection bias, off-policy evaluation, counterfactual analysis, or adaptive experimentation.
  • A track record of shipping products used by people, building production ML infrastructure, and owning model, evaluation, or infrastructure programs end to end.
  • Background in ads, marketplaces, recommenders, or ranking systems tied to business outcomes, including experience with noisy, delayed, or subjective feedback.
  • Strong technical leadership and recruiting experience. Bandits, sequential allocation, multimodal systems, agents, or latent-variable modeling are valuable.
  • Ready to work full time, in person, as an equal co-founder in an early-stage environment.

COMPENSATION

& BENEFITS Equity of 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.

Description copied from Clera's careers page. Read the full posting before you apply.

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