Founding Product Engineer at Clera — Remote

About the Role

This is a founding Product Engineer opportunity at a small, high-impact team building a core AI platform for financial risk and compliance. Founded in 2023 and operating in the RegTech / AML / KYC space, the company uses Large Language Models to automate customer due diligence workflows for fintechs and banks — think risk investigations, AML alert remediation, and document verification.

You'll sit at the intersection of engineering, product thinking, and direct customer engagement, translating cutting-edge LLM capabilities into reliable, production-ready features. You'll work closely with the founding team (including CEO and CTO), own features end-to-end, and help shape the technical and product direction of the company from an early stage.

No visa sponsorship is available — you must have the right to work in the United Kingdom.

What You'll Do

• Shape product direction and technical strategy as an early team member.
• Build and scale the core platform and new zero-to-one initiatives.
• Translate novel LLM capabilities into understandable, performant end-user experiences.
• Release production code under a "You Build It, You Run It" ownership model — shipping, operating, and iterating end-to-end.
• Work directly with enterprise customers (financial crime and risk teams) to solve critical compliance problems.
• Build integrations, data infrastructure, and tooling to enable AI agents to automate compliance workflows.
• Evolve schemas and structure non-deterministic LLM outputs for reliable downstream use.
• Lead customer calls and take ownership of customer outcomes.
• Collaborate with the founding team to mature engineering practices.
• Tackle scaling challenges, navigate ambiguity, and help hire and onboard future teammates.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Strong track record building production software, ideally at early-stage startups or on founding teams.
• Hands-on experience with the core stack: Node.js / TypeScript, Python, React, and AWS Serverless.
• Practical experience applying LLMs or large-scale NLP models to real product problems, including structuring non-deterministic outputs.
• Experience building data infrastructure and schemas for reliable, auditable downstream use.
• Comfort working directly with enterprise customers in financial risk, compliance, or related regulated domains.
• Ownership mindset — you ship, operate, and iterate; on-call is part of the role.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; comfortable leading customer calls and aligning cross-functional teams.
• Ability to hire and mentor future teammates and contribute to evolving engineering practices.
• Right to work in the United Kingdom (no sponsorship available).

Nice to Have:

• Prior experience specifically on a founding engineering team.
• Background in financial crime, AML, KYC, or RegTech domains.
• Experience at companies in adjacent spaces such as compliance automation, AI tooling, or B2B fintech SaaS.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: £75,000 – £110,000 per year, depending on experience.
• Equity: 0.25% – 0.5% (meaningful early-stage ownership).
• Opportunity to shape the company's engineering culture and hiring from the ground up.

Location

Based in London, UK. This is an on-site / hybrid role working alongside the founding team. Candidates must have the right to work in the United Kingdom — visa sponsorship is not available.