About this opportunity
River lists this Founding Engineer opportunity in new york city, New York. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
RIVER
Founding Engineer
About River
River builds AI voice agents for B2B SaaS sales teams. Our agent talks with prospects in real time: it qualifies them, answers the hard questions, demos the product by actually using it in a browser while it speaks, and follows up until the deal closes. A full AI seller, available 24/7.
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
Every River conversation runs on a sub-second loop: speech, a rendered avatar, several LLMs, and an agent using a real browser, all live in front of our customers' buyers. Your job is to make that loop fast and rock-solid. Backend and infrastructure are your priority, but you'll build across the whole product with us.
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 live-call pipeline: real-time voice, avatar, and browser streaming in one sub-second loop
Own the infrastructure behind it: deploys, scaling, observability, cost
Push our browser-use agent forward. River demos real products by controlling a browser live, clicking and navigating complex apps while it talks, and making that reliable is one of the most interesting problems here
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
3–10 years of experience as an IC. You've shipped real software that real people used
CS degree from a strong university, or equivalent exceptional experience at top-tier companies
Solid TypeScript and JavaScript, strongest on the backend (we use Next.js, Node, Postgres, Redis), comfortable in React
You've built something real with LLM APIs, not just tutorials
Product sense. You care how it feels to use, not only that it works
High ownership. You find the problem, propose the fix, and ship it — no PM required
Genuine track record of shipping serious work: products with real users or revenue, a startup attempt, accelerator experience, or something you launched and grew (beyond hobby side projects)
Nice to have
•Experience at a fast-growing, recently founded company (last ~10 years) with a high engineering bar — especially AI-product startups shipping LLM features
•Browser use / computer use, or browser automation (Playwright, Puppeteer, CDP)
•Voice, video, or anything real-time (WebRTC a plus)
•Go-to-market / sales-tech tooling, automations, or exposure to the sales workflow
•Scraping, enrichment, or data pipelines
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
Genuinely interesting problems: real-time voice AI and browser-use agents, live in front of real customers
Competitive comp: $170,000–$220,000 plus 1.0%–2.5% founding equity
Try the product /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.
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.