AI Engineer (New York)

Founding AI Engineer

Full-time | New York | In person

About the Company

River builds AI voice agents for B2B SaaS sales teams.

The agent talks with prospects in real time, qualifies them, answers questions, demonstrates the product by navigating it in a browser while speaking, and follows up after the conversation.

River is an early-stage company with paying customers and is building its engineering team in New York. The company is backed by founders and operators from companies including Ramp, Kalshi, and JumpCloud.

Role Overview

As a Founding AI Engineer, you’ll build the agent at the center of River’s product: how it listens, reasons through a conversation, uses tools, navigates a browser, and responds when a buyer interrupts, changes direction, or asks an unexpected question.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You’ll work directly with the founders and have significant ownership over systems that run live in front of real buyers.

The role combines AI engineering with product and customer problems. You should be comfortable understanding the broader architecture, building AI workflows, and developing custom solutions for customers when the product needs to adapt to a particular use case.

River cares more about evidence that you can build and ship strong AI products than a specific technology stack, degree, or number of years in the industry.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the AI agent that powers River’s live sales conversations.
• Design how the agent listens, makes decisions, uses tools, and responds during unpredictable real-time conversations.
• Build AI workflows that turn product and customer requirements into working systems.
• Work on the browser-driven portion of the product, where the agent navigates software while interacting with a buyer.
• Understand the product’s broader architecture and make thoughtful engineering decisions across the system.
• Work directly with customers when a use case requires a custom solution, then apply what you learn to improve the product.
• Ship production systems, observe how they perform in real customer interactions, and iterate based on what you learn.
• Work closely with the founders and other engineers as the team and product evolve.

Required Qualifications

• Experience building and shipping AI agents or AI-powered products into production.
• Hands-on experience building AI workflows rather than only experimenting with AI tools.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to understand and work across a product’s architecture.
• Experience taking ownership of technical problems from initial ambiguity through a working production solution.
• Ability to build for real customer needs and make practical tradeoffs between product experience and technical implementation.
• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment where engineers have substantial ownership and the product evolves quickly.
• Willingness to work primarily in person with the River team in New York.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in one or more of the following areas would be valuable, but these are not requirements:

• Voice AI or other real-time systems.
• WebRTC, streaming, or low-latency applications.
• Browser or computer automation.
• Customer-facing or forward-deployed engineering.
• Building or working at an early-stage startup.
• Founding a startup or operating in another high-ownership engineering environment.

Compensation and Benefits

Base Salary $150K-$190K

Meaningful Equity

Health Insurance

Paid Time Off

The role is based in New York and is primarily in person. River expects approximately four days per week in the office.

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.