Senior Software Engineer

The Opportunity

The future of all businesses is technology-enabled. The companies that will come to dominate entire industries are being built on technology, creating advantages that will compound over decades. We know this to be true because it's happening in real time across almost every imaginable category of the global economy. For the few industries where transformation has not yet begun, it's a question of when, not if.

Ultra-high-net-worth wealth management is one of them. That’s why we’re building Riviera.

The Problem

The family offices and advisory firms managing the world’s most successful families’ wealth do demanding, high-stakes work on tools that were never built for it. Trillions of dollars run on spreadsheets, filing cabinets, and disconnected point solutions. The financial lives these firms manage are extraordinarily complex: assets housed at dozens of custodians; portfolios spanning hundreds of investments across all asset types; arcane, ever-evolving trust and entity structures; and financial operations as complicated as those of multi-billion dollar companies.

The industry's answer has been more of the same: more people, more spreadsheets, more manual reconciliation, and more legacy software producing work out of date the moment it is created. Clients tolerated this because there was no other option. That's changing. The people building and backing the very companies recasting the global economy with technology know better — and they want their wealth managed differently.

What We're Building

Riviera is a financial technology platform built to be the command center for family wealth.

Born from a genuine problem experienced firsthand at Santa Barbara Management, Riviera was created because nothing in the market was built to enable an intelligence-first future. The category has been dominated by PDFs, pen and paper, and point solutions that don't talk to each other. That fragmentation is the reason the most transformative technologies of our era have never had a real foothold here. No unified data layer means no intelligence layer. Riviera changes that.

We aggregate the vast, fragmented financial universe of an exceptional family into a single, unified intelligence layer — surfacing critical insights, automating complex workflows, and giving clients real-time command over their financial lives. Where the industry has historically reported on wealth, Riviera enables families to direct it.

The consolidation of fragmented data that Riviera delivers is the prerequisite for intelligent automation to work in this space. We are building the foundation — and we intend to own the agentic future of UHNW wealth management.

This is the kind of product that will define a massive and growing category, while making the rest of the industry's "technology" look like it was built twenty years ago — because it was.

The Role

This is a hands-on, full-stack product role on an AI-native platform, at the earliest stage, working alongside founders who have started, scaled, and backed category-defining companies. The product already has live clients, real revenue, and its initial architecture in place, so your focus is what comes next: shaping the product, pushing AI deeper into it, and keeping it secure as we add clients. You'll partner closely with the technical team and head of product, with meaningful agency and ownership that comes with being early.

What You'll Do

Craft the Product Families Live In. You'll help build the product surface and the reporting and decision-support experience that turns a family's tangled financial reality into something they can act on. You'll design and ship the views that render deeply nested ownership (trusts owning LLCs owning funds, looked through to the people who actually own it) fast, legibly, and accurately, and evolve the architecture as the product grows from early conviction into something families depend on daily.

Keep the Most Sensitive Data in Finance Airtight. You'll take ownership of the multi-tenant security and access model that already runs the platform. As we add families, offices, and advisors, you'll harden the authorization rules, the permissions graph, and tenant isolation, and move the platform toward a formal security audit and SOC 2. This is the most sensitive data in finance, and the access rules are hard to get right. Getting that right, and being able to prove it as the system grows, is some of the most important work here.

Ship Fast, With Real Families on the Other End. You'll work closely with the technical team and head of product, shipping against real feedback from our first clients instead of guessing about what they want. Find the smallest slice that delivers the most value, ship it, and improve it. You'll make the calls on speed versus durability, and on what to write yourself versus what to adopt, and you'll live with how they turn out.

Make It Intelligent. You'll help create the intelligence and automation layer that lets families act on their wealth instead of just reading reports about it. With the data finally in one place, that means turning it into clear answers and workflows that run on their own. You'll use AI heavily in how you work and move faster than a team many times your size, and you'll know when its output is right and when it isn't.

Who You Are

You have spent your career shipping software that real people depend on, and you still write the code yourself. You work across the stack, from the interface someone actually uses down to the data and access rules underneath it. You've run what you shipped, owned the failures, and made it better.

You are AI-native in the way that actually means something: how you build today looks materially different from how it did two years ago. You can point to exactly what changed, what you use, and what it has done to your output.

You think like a product person. You have opinions about what good software feels like, you work closely with the people who use it, and you turn vague problems into things people actually want. You move fast, prioritize hard, and make the call yourself when there is no product manager in the room, because often you are the one making it. You like being early, where the work is unfinished and the founders next to you have done this before.

What We Look For

Full-Stack and Hands-On. You ship across the whole stack, from the interface a person uses to the data and rules behind it, and you still maintain the code yourself. You are comfortable dropping into an existing system and making it better, not only starting from scratch, and you have run real software in production.

Product Orientation. You approach engineering through a product lens. Demonstrated history of caring about user experience, shaping roadmaps, and making build decisions informed by how real people use software. The best engineers at this stage are part builder, part product thinker. You are both.

AI-Native Approach. Specific, demonstrable fluency with AI tooling as a core part of how you build. You can articulate exactly what changed, what you use, and what it has done to your output. This is a requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Infrastructure and DevOps Depth. Hands-on experience with GCP or AWS. You have built and maintained CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, alerting, and deployment infrastructure.

Security Depth. You think about access and privacy from the first day, and you can take an existing multi-tenant access model and keep it airtight as it grows. For a platform holding the financial lives of private families, getting this right is not optional.

System Design Judgment. You’ve taken a system from its first architecture through real growth, and you can explain what held up, what broke and what you’d do differently. You reason about tradeoffs out loud: data modeling, sync vs. async, caching and invalidation, ingestion that’s safe to retry, and where authorization lives. You know when the right answer is a plain Postgres table and when it isn’t.

Domain Curiosity. Experience in fintech, wealth management, or adjacent regulated industries is a plus, as is familiarity with financial data APIs, aggregation platforms, or custodian integrations.

What We Offer

• Senior Engineer Status. Direct access to the CEO and founding team, and significant influence over product direction from day one.
• A Category-Defining Problem. One of the most under-innovated, data-rich, and consequential categories in financial services. The people who join now will help shape what this company becomes.
• Exceptional Colleagues. The team behind Riviera has spent their careers building, backing, and operating category-defining technology companies. You will be working alongside people who have done this before at the highest level. The bar is high, and that's the point.
• The Conditions to Do Your Best Work. Competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, equity, and the infrastructure to move fast. We work together in-person four days a week in our Chicago HQ because the best ideas and the strongest cultures are built in the same room.

About Santa Barbara Management

Santa Barbara Management is the wealth engineering firm for which Riviera was built — and its first client. Founded by accomplished business builders and investors who lived the complexity of extraordinary wealth firsthand, SBM was created to solve a problem the industry had never genuinely tried to solve. The model is fully integrated: investments, tax, trust and estate, financial operations, and strategic finance — one team, one fee, engineered around the family rather than the portfolio. Today, SBM serves some of the most accomplished founders and investors of our time. The technology SBM needed to deliver on that promise didn't exist. So we built Riviera.

Riviera is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or any other legally protected status. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any of the above characteristics. Riviera is enrolled in E-Verify to confirm the identity and employment eligibility of all new employees.