Clera Founding-team research and engineering role at a seed-stage startup building a wearable device to infer real-time emotional states. Own and lead the core inference model from research through deployment.
Responsibilities
This is a founding-team research and engineering position at a seed-stage, Y Combinator–backed startup building a wearable device that infers and interprets real-time emotional states. The company is early — prototypes are already on users' wrists — and this hire is expected to own and ultimately lead the core inference work as the team scales.
Design, develop, and iterate on the inference model that quantifies emotional states from multimodal wearable sensor signals (audio, biometric, and others).
Bridge neuroscience research — including frameworks such as active inference — and production-grade ML systems.
Collaborate closely with hardware and product team members to integrate the model into the wearable pipeline.
Take ownership of model performance, versioning, and deployment as the product moves toward broader release.
Help define the scientific and engineering roadmap for the inference layer as the company grows.
Qualification
PhD in computational neuroscience
Required
PhD in computational neuroscience, cognitive science, active inference, or a closely related field.
Demonstrated experience bridging neuroscience research and production machine learning systems — you can take a model from theory to deployment.
Strong Python proficiency for ML model development and deployment.
US work authorization required (visa transfers considered; new visa sponsorship is not available).
Preferred
Hands-on experience with active inference or predictive coding frameworks.
Background working with wearable or physiological sensor data.
Comfort operating as both a researcher and an engineer in a fast-moving, small team.
Wet-lab-only neuroscience backgrounds without computational or ML components.
