Senior/Staff Software Engineer (AI)

The Role

We're looking for a Senior/Staff Software Engineer (AI) to join a small, high-output team. You'll operate across the entire product — going wherever you're needed most and leading from there. You’ll take on the projects with the highest complexity and ambiguity. You’ll drive clarity on both the business problems and their implementation, being a go-to person when engineers are stuck or leadership needs technical direction.

You'll code 80%+ of the time while helping run the engineering org — shaping architecture, mentoring others, pushing decisions. Initially, you'll own the infrastructure work that comes with rapid growth — but you'll quickly work across the entire stack and touch everything.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who wants to build, raise the bar, and help scale a team from 4 to 8+ engineers.

About Rivio

Rivio is a San Francisco–based AI technology company built for modern procurement teams that need to make better decisions, faster, and with confidence. Powered by Sheldon, Rivio embeds world-class procurement data and expertise directly into sourcing and negotiation workflows, helping teams capture repeatable savings, expand coverage without adding headcount, and build institutional knowledge that compounds over time.

Rivio is backed by Gradient Ventures, MIT, and S32, with strategic advisors from Meta, Apple, and other leading technology companies.

Job Requirements

Must have:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
• High proficiency with an AI coding assistant is mandatory (most of us use Claude Code)
• Track record of building and scaling significant portions of large systems or building complex distributed systems end-to-end
• Deep expertise in observability — you've built the logging, monitoring, and alerting that keeps your systems healthy and outages in check
• Fluent in data ingestion and transformation — ETL pipelines, third-party API integrations, and dealing with messy external data
• Proven engineering leader — you've driven architectural decisions, raised the bar for the team, and mentored engineers at all levels
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments typical of early-stage startups

Nice to have:

• Hands-on experience with AWS (Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, CDK)
• Experience with agent evals/LLM evaluation frameworks
• DevOps/Infrastructure experience — CI/CD, automation, infrastructure as code
• Security engineering experience — hardening APIs, compliance, threat modeling

Tech stack:

• Backend: Python
• Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS
• Databases: Neo4j, DynamoDB, Redis
• AI: Proprietary agent orchestration layer on top of Claude, GPT, and Gemini
• Cloud: AWS on CDK

What You Will Do

• Build the product : Work across AI agents, knowledge graphs, APIs, and more — you're a generalist who goes deep where needed
• Own Reliability, Scaling & Performance : Unblock bottlenecks, optimize latency, build observability, own agent evals
• Lead technically : Shape architecture, translate business needs into technical direction, push decisions, spot cracks early
• Help run the team : Contribute to roadmap discussions, sprint planning, project scoping, unblocking engineers
• Raise the bar : Set the standard for quality, speed, and ownership. Mentor engineers, challenge the team to do better, and lead by example.

What We Believe

• Drive : We hire for drive first. It shows up as deep ownership, working on things no one asked you to do, and caring about outcomes — not just outputs.
• Velocity : Ship at 70-80% confidence, iterate fast, refuse to wait for perfect conditions.
• Agency : Act without permission. Set your own direction. Treat problems as experiments.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and equity (based on experience)
• Significant impact on an early-stage startup backed by top-tier investors
• Dynamic, collaborative work environment
• Major opportunities for professional growth
• Comprehensive health insurance: medical, dental, and vision coverage

Why You Shouldn't Join

• You're not ready for the occasional 60-hour week when things are on fire
• You need clear structure and well-defined requirements to do your best work
• You're looking for a predictable career path — we're still early-stage
• You want to manage people, not code