Founding Backend Engineer - Equity & Shape the Platform

River; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Directly with founders

River product access

Job summary

River is seeking a founding backend engineer in New York to shape the company's technology from day one. You’ll own significant domain decisions and build the infrastructure that scales with our growth.

Work directly with the founders, ship features across the stack, and engage with customers as River evolves into its next phase. In-person, highly autonomous environment with equity on offer.

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.
• Real product opinions. You care about what we build, not just how, and you'll tell us when you think we're wrong.

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 development

Infrastructure

Observability

Real-time / low-latency

TypeScript

Node.js

Next.js

PostgreSQL

Redis

Ownership mindset

Tools

LiveKit

WebSockets

Job description

River is seeking a founding backend engineer in New York to shape the company's technology from day one. You’ll own significant domain decisions and build the infrastructure that scales with our growth.

Work directly with the founders, ship features across the stack, and engage with customers as River evolves into its next phase. In-person, highly autonomous environment with equity on offer.