# Software Engineer, River API at River AI

- Company: River AI
- What the company does: Develop frontier language models and agents. Training, reinforcement learning, and inference in one system, on River Cloud or your own GPU cluster. Backed by General Catalyst.
- Company website: https://river.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Palo Alto, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $200K to $420K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-05-13
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/riverai/jobs/4248217009
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/river-ai-software-engineer-river-api/

## About the role

We are looking for exceptional systems engineers to build the high-performance engines that train our models. Your goal is to make training at River fast, reliable, and massively scalable. You will take ownership of our core infrastructure stack; from writing custom GPU kernels to managing clusters of thousands of nodes, ensuring our researchers can focus on science rather than system bottlenecks.

## What they're looking for

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical industry experience
- Deep expertise in systems-level languages (C, C++, or Rust) with a track record of writing performant, maintainable code
- Strong foundation in computer architecture, memory management, and concurrent programming
- Exceptional debugging skills, especially when tackling complex, non-deterministic issues in distributed environments
- A highly collaborative mindset and a bias for action to push boundaries across the stack
- Hands-on experience with modern AI frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX) and tooling for large-scale model training

Tags: River API