You will own the live-call pipeline for River’s voice AI agent, ensuring sub-second response times during live customer interactions. As a founding backend engineer, you will manage infrastructure, scale the data layer, and build reliable browser automation to demo products in real-time. This is a high-ownership role defining the engineering foundations of autonomous sales.
Founding Backend Engineer at River
Join River as a Founding Backend Engineer to build the world’s first autonomous AI Account Executive. Backed by the founders of Ramp, Kalshi, and JumpCloud, River is creating voice AI agents that don’t just generate leads; they join live calls, demo products, and close deals. You will own the live-call pipeline and infrastructure, solving sub-second latency challenges at the intersection of WebRTC and LLMs. If you are a high-ownership engineer ready to define the future of sales in-person in NYC, this is your seat.
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Location
New York, United States
Compensation
$170k-$220k + Equity
Company
River
Role overview
AI Sales
River builds AI voice agents that sell. Backed the founders of Ramp and Kalshi.
What you will do
- Architect and maintain the live-call pipeline, ensuring low-latency stability and performance for voice AI agents during high-stakes sales conversations.
- Own the end-to-end infrastructure including deployments, scaling, observability, and incident response using technologies like Railway, Postgres, and Redis.
- Develop robust browser automation tools using Playwright and CDP to enable the AI to drive live product demos while speaking to prospects.
Who this is a fit for
- Brings 5+ years of experience building production backend systems with a proven track record of personally owning reliability, on-call rotations, and incident response.
- Possesses deep expertise in real-time, streaming, or low-latency systems such as WebRTC, voice protocols, or high-throughput trading platforms.
- Is a senior-level generalist comfortable with TypeScript and Node who uses AI agents to multiply their output and can ship without a formal spec.
Why this role is remarkable
- Join a founding team backed by iconic fintech and trading founders from Ramp, Kalshi, and JumpCloud to solve the hardest latency problems in voice AI.
- Work on a product that is already generating revenue and seeing demand that outpaces capacity, moving beyond simple lead generation to autonomous sales closing.
- Solve deep technical challenges involving real-time WebRTC pipelines, browser-use automation, and LLM orchestration where every millisecond counts in front of live buyers.
How Jack & Jill work together
I get to know what you’re great at, then find roles you’d never find yourself.Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.
I recruit from Jack’s network and make the intro when I spot a great match.And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.
Jack gets to know what you're great at and what you want next, then searches 15 million jobs daily and helps you discover roles at companies like this.
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If your profile’s a match and River wants to meet, Jill will make the intro. In the meantime, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.