Staff Engineer — Agentic AI
Clera · San Francisco, CA
$160,000–$250,000from the description
Jul 20, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level technical lead role at an early-stage AI startup, responsible for owning the core intelligence layer of an AI agent product targeting mechanical engineering workflows in CAD, simulation, and PLM tools. The work centers on improving agent task success rates, defining evaluation frameworks and token budgets, translating user research into benchmarks, and making foundational architecture decisions — while also managing a small team of AI engineers and domain specialists.
Staff level · 7+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,150 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 230–1,700
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The role is explicitly titled 'Staff Engineer' and reports directly to the CTO with cross-team technical leadership scope, supporting the Staff seniority classification.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role is primarily software engineering (agent architecture, production code, Python) but has a strong AI/ML evaluation and benchmarking dimension that overlaps with 15-2051 Data Scientists. Software Developers (15-1252) wins because the primary deliverable is a shipped agentic software system, not statistical modeling.
The 7+ years overall and 2+ years agentic LLM experience requirements are stated as hard dealbreakers in the posting's own 'Dealbreakers (must-haves)' section.
LLM observability/tracing tools are required; Logfire and LangSmith are named as examples ('e.g.'), so they are captured as alternatives rather than the primary name.
SWE-bench, GAIA, and τ-bench appear under the dealbreakers section as 'familiarity with benchmarks such as…' — the 'such as' qualifier signals these specific tools are illustrative examples of a required capability (benchmark familiarity), not individually gated; they are marked preferred accordingly.
Desktop automation, COM, CAD/CAE, and PLM all appear under the 'Nice to Have' section and are marked preferred.
Visa sponsorship is explicitly unavailable; candidates must be US work-authorized.
Equity (early-stage, Series A) is offered alongside the stated salary range but is not quantified.
Ignored 6 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): LLM tool-calling / function calling, LLM orchestration, context window management, LLM observability / tracing tools, desktop automation, COM automation.
Read the full posting
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