Founding AI Engineer

What You’ll Do

• Lead the AI domain at Upriver: Take ownership of our agent architecture and help define its next phases, standards, and direction.
• Solve hard, unsolved problems: Work on challenges in AI agents, reasoning over complex systems, and autonomous decision-making that don’t yet have clear playbooks.
• Build production AI: Design, implement, evaluate, and deploy AI systems used by real customers.
• Be outward-facing: Publish technical blogs, benchmarks, and papers; represent Upriver in the AI and data community.
• Move fast with autonomy: Own problems end-to-end with minimal guidance, working directly with founders.
• Deliver real customer value end-to-end: take features from idea to production, see them used by customers, and iterate based on real-world impact.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong background in AI / ML (applied research, systems, or both).
• Experience building or experimenting with hands-on software development.
• Comfortable operating independently and making foundational technical decisions.
• Strong communication skills and interest in writing, publishing, and sharing work publicly.
• High ambition and desire to grow into a technical leadership role.
• Extra: Hands-on experience experimenting with large language models (LLMs),

Why Upriver

• Define a new category: Be part of a team figuring out how AI agents actually work inside real data platforms, and build a category leader product.
• High ownership, high trust: You’ll make real architectural and product decisions early on.
• Top-tier team: Work with exceptional engineers at a very high bar.
• Join at the inflection point: Strong early traction, a fresh seed round, and the opportunity to grow rapidly with the company as it scales.