Founding Backend Engineer — Equity, Build Core Infra in NYC

River; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Direct with founders

In-person in NYC

Job summary

River is hiring in-person in New York for a founding backend engineer role. You\u2019ll own the infrastructure, scaling, monitoring, and cost, while shaping the product and establishing engineering foundations as the team grows.

You will ship features across the stack and engage with customers directly. The ideal candidate has 5+ years building production backend systems, strong TS/Node skills, and a high-ownership mindset.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and running production backend systems.
• Strong infrastructure skills: deploys, observability, scaling on a major cloud.
• Real-time or streaming experience (WebRTC, voice, video, websockets) or comparable low-latency work.
• Comfortable in TypeScript and Node (Next.js, Postgres, Redis).
• Senior, high-ownership mindset. You\'re fine with ambiguity and you don\'t wait for a spec.

Responsibilities

• Own the infrastructure behind it: deploys, scaling, observability, cost.
• Put the engineering foundations in place as the team grows: monitoring, incident response, testing, evals.
• Ship product features across the stack, and talk to customers.

Skills

Backend systems

Infrastructure

Real-time / low-latency

TypeScript / Node.js

Senior ownership

Customer-facing

Tools

Next.js

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

River is hiring in-person in New York for a founding backend engineer role. You\u2019ll own the infrastructure, scaling, monitoring, and cost, while shaping the product and establishing engineering foundations as the team grows.

You will ship features across the stack and engage with customers directly. The ideal candidate has 5+ years building production backend systems, strong TS/Node skills, and a high-ownership mindset.