Founding Engineer ($170k–$220k + Equity) at River

River is a $2M pre-seed New York startup backed by the founders of Ramp, Kalshi, Lean, and Hearth building autonomous AI sales agents for live video.

About the role

As the Founding Engineer at River, you will architect the real-time infrastructure and backend systems powering "Liv," an AI agent that joins live video calls to demo products and close deals. You’ll own everything from WebRTC media pipelines and low-latency streaming to production reliability, shipping end-to-end features in a high-ownership, NYC-based environment.

Why this role is remarkable

• Join an elite $2M pre-seed startup backed by the founders of Ramp, Kalshi, and Lean at the ground floor in New York City.
• Solve a massive market problem by building AI agents that eliminate scheduling friction and handle high-volume SMB deals autonomously in real-time.
• Exercise total technical ownership, making critical architectural calls and shipping product features directly alongside the founding team without the need for specs.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain high-performance WebRTC media pipelines and low-latency streaming infrastructure to ensure AI sales calls feel seamless and human-like.
• Scale production backend systems and inference serving using TypeScript and Node, managing everything from cloud deployments to CI/CD and observability.
• Ship end-to-end product features that directly impact how buyers interact with AI, moving from infrastructure scaling to product-facing improvements daily.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience running production backend systems with personal ownership of reliability, including on-call rotation and incident management.
• Deep expertise in real-time, low-latency, or streaming technologies like WebRTC, media servers, or high-throughput APIs from a tier-1 technical pedigree.
• Operates as a high-ownership generalist who can manage complex cloud infrastructure unassisted while maintaining a relentless focus on shipping production-ready code.

Pay

$170k–$220k + Equity

Location

New York, USA