Founding Engineer

StartX; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity: 0.5%–2%

US citizen or visa holder only

Job summary

Upriver is seeking a founding engineer to help construct a data-driven platform that translates cross-web signals into a structured context graph for agents and AI apps. You will work closely with the founding team to design scalable pipelines and robust APIs while exploring frontier data processing techniques in production systems.

The role is full-time and in-person in San Francisco, with equity and visa eligibility.

Qualifications

• Experience building agents to solve problems.
• Experience building scalable data pipelines, APIs, and backend systems.
• Willingness to work in person in San Francisco, CA.

Responsibilities

• Build data pipelines at huge web scale.
• Leverage multimodal and frontier data processing techniques to spot patterns, historical lookbacks, and future patterns.
• Build performant APIs that can handle high concurrent loads.

Skills

Agents development

Data pipelines

APIs

Job description

Salary range USD 130,000 - 200,000 / year

Helping AI agents understand how attention is moving online

About Upriver

Upriver turns what’s happening across the web and social into a structured context graph of companies, people, and topics, so agents and LLM apps can catch what’s breaking out while it’s still early.

Our customers are building at the forefront of GTM and marketing agents, including Clay and Unify. By working with them, we’ve seen firsthand the problem of getting agents fresh context that’s grounded in real-world behavior.

We’re backed by investors including Llama Ventures, Abstraction Capital, Corazon Capital, and angels from Instagram, Fanatics, and Clay. We have early revenue and are excited to now expand our team with our founding engineer.

The founders

We’ve spent our careers building in consumer/social and have a deep love for niche online communities, internet culture, and how attention evolves:

• Joe (CTO) worked on core ad infra at Spotify, was tech lead for Instagram Reels and Live, and led natural language search and image classification at Google Photos.

The role

This should be a great fit if you:

• Want to work on an open-ended problem that hasn’t been solved yet in the agent space.
• Are always tinkering and building something to solve your own problems.
• Are opinionated about the process of building, not just the outcome.
• Want the option to work closely with customers so you get to see how your product is being used in production systems.

Preferred experience

• You’ve built agents to solve problems.
• You’ve built scalable data pipelines, APIs, and backend systems.

Some of the technical problems you’ll tackle

• Build data pipelines at huge web scale.
• Leverage multimodal and frontier data processing techniques to spot patterns, calculate historical lookbacks, and predict future patterns.
• Build performant APIs that can handle high concurrent loads.

The role is full-time, in person in San Francisco. We work out of a coworking space in Dogpatch.

Equity: 0.5%–2%. US citizen or visa holder only.

The interview process should take 1–2 weeks total

• Intro call with Joe (30 mins)
• On-site interviews (2–3 hours and team lunch)

Contact [e-mail] or [e-mail].

Original job description: https://share.upriver.ai/founding-eng