This is a job that Jill, our AI Recruiter, is recruiting for on behalf of one of our customers.
She will pick the best candidates from Jack's network.
The next step is to speak to Jack.
Job Title
Founding Engineer
Salary
$130K-$200K + Equity
Company Description
Upriver is a seed-stage San Francisco startup backed by Llama Ventures and Abstraction Capital building a structured context layer for AI agents. Founded by technical leaders from Instagram and Twitch, Upriver turns massive web activity into a real-time graph of companies, people, and topics to power the next generation of marketing agents.
Job Description
Join Upriver as our first engineer to build the infrastructure that helps AI agents understand breaking online trends. You will architect high-scale data pipelines and multimodal processing systems that turn web activity into a structured context graph. Work directly with founders from Twitch, Spotify, and Instagram to shape the frontier of agentic GTM and marketing.
Location
San Francisco, USA
Why this role is remarkable
- Join as the first engineer with outsized equity (0.5-2%) and a seat at the table with founders who led teams at Instagram, Spotify, and Google.
- Solve high-scale technical challenges involving massive web-scale data pipelines and frontier AI models to predict what breaks out online before it goes viral.
- Backed by elite investors including Llama Ventures, Abstraction Capital, and angels from Instagram and Clay, the company is already live with revenue and top-tier customers.
What You Will Do
- Architect and own end-to-end data pipelines at massive scale to capture and process real-time signals from across the web and social media.
- Develop multimodal data processing systems to identify emerging patterns and build the structured context graph powering high-performance AI agents.
- Design and maintain high-concurrency APIs that serve as the backbone for customers like Clay and Unify building at the frontier of AI GTM.
The ideal candidate
- Strong backend generalist with a proven track record of building scalable data infrastructure, distributed systems, and robust API layers from the ground up.
- Passionate tinkerer who has experimented with LLMs and agents to solve complex problems and is energized by open-ended technical challenges in the agent space.
- High-velocity builder with existing US work authorization who thrives in a fast-paced, in-person environment and is comfortable defining product specifications alongside founders.
Who are Jack & Jill?
Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.
And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.
How does this work?
- Jack's an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
- Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack's network.
- If it's a match and the company wants to meet you, they'll make the intro. In the meantime, if you'd like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.
We never post fake jobs
This isn't a trick. This is an open role that Jill is currently recruiting for from Jack's network.
Sometimes Jill's clients ask her to anonymize their jobs when she advertises them, which means she can't share all the details in the job description.
We appreciate this can make them look a bit suspect, but there isn't much we can do about it.
Give Jack a spin! You could land this role. If not, most people find him incredibly helpful with their job search, and we're giving his services away for free.