Founding Network Engineer at Clearspace

About Clearspace

Clearspace is building the intentionality layer of the internet. Our mission is to build technology as effective at protecting human attention as social media is at exploiting it (infinite scrolling, short-form feeds, manipulative notifications, etc). Our category defining mobile app has been featured on Huberman Lab, New York Times Wirecutter, NPR Marketplace, Forbes, TBPN.

People that want a better relationship with their devices have nowhere to turn except for willpower. We are building a system allows users to control what their devices see by processing and filtering network traffic against natural language rules.

About The Role

We’re looking for a networking-obsessed engineer to own the VPN + first-hop policy proxy that powers our AI agent. You don’t need to be an IKEv2 expert, we care more about deep networking intuition, debugging skill, and the desire to go all the way down the stack until the truth reveals itself.

You might be a great fit if you’ve built:

• High-throughput proxies or gateways
• Traffic/security systems
• Realtime consumer networking
• Anything that required living in packet captures and shipping reliable fixes

What You’ll Build

• A global VPN and policy-aware proxy that can apply human-language rules to real traffic in real time.
• Region-aware routing and connection strategies that keep users fast and stable as they move.
• The foundations for safe, privacy-respecting traffic classification at consumer scale.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building and operating high-throughput networking or edge systems (proxying, gateways, L4/L7 traffic, security, CDNs, realtime infra, etc.).
• Demonstrated ability to debug across the network stack using packet captures and system-level tooling.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals (performance, reliability, observability, incident response).
• Comfortable reading specs/RFCs and diving into unfamiliar protocols quickly.
• Proficiency in Go (TypeScript a plus).
• Excited by Clearspace’s mission and willing to work onsite in San Francisco.

Nice to Have

• Experience with VPNs or secure tunneling (IPsec/IKEv2, WireGuard, StrongSwan, OpenVPN).
• Experience building or extending proxy servers or L7 gateways.
• Background in traffic analysis, classification, or DPI.
• Familiarity with mobile networking constraints (roaming, captive portals, battery, NAT).
• Experience with eBPF or kernel-adjacent performance tooling.

Compensation

• Key role in a consumer AI startup shaping the future of the internet
• Autonomy, speed, and full visibility into product and company building