Founding Engineer

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

We just closed a $2M pre-seed, backed by the founders of companies like Ramp, Kalshi, and JumpCloud. We turned on revenue recently and demand already outpaces what we can serve. This is our founders' second company — they built and sold the first.

About the role

This is a founding role: you're a core member of the team, shaping what River becomes, not just keeping it running. Many decisions will be yours to own.

What you'll do

• 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

Requirements

• 5+ years building and running production backend systems. You've been the person responsible when things break
• 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 (we use 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

Nice to have

• Experience at a strong, recently founded company (last ~10 years) with a high engineering bar, ideally a startup you joined early or founded
• LiveKit or similar real-time media stacks (WebRTC media servers, Pipecat)
• Voice AI, avatars, or media pipelines
• Go-to-market / sales-tech tooling or exposure to the sales workflow

Culture fit: We're a fast-moving team of serial builders. We want an AI-native engineer who owns their domain end to end, produces the output of a much larger team, and is here for the mission and the ride — not the perks.

Why River

• A founding role, with meaningful equity and a whole domain that's yours from day one
• You work directly with the founders and shape the product, not just the infrastructure
• Try the product yourself at rivergtm.com/start

Location

In-person in New York (4–5 days/week).

No visa sponsorship or relocation support.

Process

2–3 interviews — behavioral/culture screen, a build-together technical session, and a possible final in-person round.

Additional Job Application Terms

This job is part of LinkedIn’s Full-Service Hiring beta program. Eligibility is limited to candidates located in and performing services in the United States, excluding those based in Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, South Carolina, or West Virginia.

We’re committed to making our hiring process as smooth and timely as possible, and we understand that waiting to hear back can add to the anticipation. If you’re a potential fit, our team will reach out within two weeks to progress you to the next stage. If you don’t hear from us in that time, we encourage you to explore other opportunities with our team in the future, and we wish you the very best in your job search.