Software Engineer

About this role

Software Engineer

Build and ship the infrastructure powering enterprise AI — across backend, data pipelines, AI systems, and frontend, with real ownership of technical and product decisions.

Team : Engineering

Location : San Francisco, CA or Remote

Type : Full-time

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About Riley AI

Riley AI is building the business context layer that connects enterprise data to AI, enabling businesses to make smarter, faster, and more accurate decisions. Our platform transforms fragmented business data into a unified context layer that powers AI agents, analytics, and business intelligence. We're backed by leading venture capital firms and work with enterprises across industries to help them unlock the full potential of AI. We're a small, ambitious team moving quickly to build a category-defining company.

Benefits include: Competitive salary, healthcare coverage, real equity ownership, and a wellness budget you'll actually use — from marathon shoes and cold plunges to massages, matcha subscriptions, mechanical keyboards, or whatever keeps you feeling like your best self.

About the role

We're looking for a high-agency, product-minded Software Engineer who thrives in a fast-paced startup environment and loves building products that customers actually use.

You'll work across our technology stack to build, ship, and improve the infrastructure powering enterprise AI. You'll have significant ownership over technical decisions, product development, and the customer experience.

We're looking for someone who understands that great engineering isn't just about writing elegant code. It's about solving meaningful problems, delivering value to customers, and moving quickly.

You should be comfortable with ambiguity, motivated by challenging problems, and excited to build in an environment where speed, ownership, and impact matter more than rigid processes.

What you'll do

Build and ship products customers love

• Design, develop, and ship features that solve real customer problems.
• Work closely with customers, founders, and the product team to understand user needs and translate them into practical solutions.
• Take ownership of features from initial concept through development, deployment, and iteration.
• Prioritize customer impact and business value over technical novelty.
• Continuously improve product usability, performance, reliability, and scalability.

Build and scale AI infrastructure

• Develop and maintain the systems powering Riley's context infrastructure, data integrations, and AI capabilities.
• Work across the stack, including backend services, APIs, data pipelines, AI systems, and frontend experiences.
• Solve complex engineering challenges involving enterprise data, AI reasoning, and system performance.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Identify and eliminate technical bottlenecks that slow down product development or customer adoption.

Own problems end to end

• Take responsibility for technical challenges from discovery through resolution.
• Proactively identify product gaps, engineering improvements, and opportunities to create customer value.
• Collaborate closely with the team to prioritize and execute against ambitious product goals.
• Respond quickly to customer feedback, production issues, and changing business priorities.
• Contribute to a culture of rapid experimentation, continuous learning, and high accountability.

Who we're looking for

We're looking for someone with strong technical fundamentals, exceptional ownership, and a relentless bias toward action.

Speed and bias toward action

• You move quickly from ideas to working solutions.
• You understand and apply the 80/20 principle, focusing on the 20% of work that delivers 80% of the value.
• You know when to build a simple solution today rather than spend weeks engineering a perfect one.
• You prioritize shipping, learning, and iterating over excessive planning or premature optimization.
• You balance speed with sound engineering judgment, especially when reliability, security, or customer trust is at stake.

Product mindset and customer obsession

• You care deeply about what customers need, not just what's technically interesting.
• You measure engineering success by customer impact, not code complexity or technical sophistication.
• You're willing to challenge requirements and simplify solutions to deliver value faster.
• You actively seek customer feedback and use it to guide technical decisions.
• You understand that the best technical solution isn't always the most valuable product solution.

Extreme ownership and high agency

• You take full responsibility for your work, from identifying problems to delivering results.
• You don't wait for detailed specifications or constant direction to make progress.
• When something breaks, you take initiative to understand and resolve it.
• You proactively communicate blockers, trade-offs, and progress.
• You think like an owner, considering how your decisions affect customers, teammates, and the business.

Grit and resourcefulness

• You're persistent when solving difficult technical problems.
• You're comfortable working with incomplete information, unfamiliar technologies, and evolving requirements.
• When your first approach fails, you quickly find another path forward.
• You're willing to go beyond your immediate responsibilities to help the team succeed.
• You see constraints as opportunities to be creative rather than reasons to stop.

Pragmatic engineering judgment

• You know the difference between technical excellence and overengineering.
• You favor simple, maintainable solutions over unnecessary abstraction and complexity.
• You make thoughtful trade-offs between speed, performance, reliability, and scalability.
• You're comfortable making decisions without perfect information and adjusting as you learn.
• You understand when technical debt is acceptable and when it must be addressed.

Adaptability and low ego

• You thrive in environments where priorities change quickly.
• You're open to direct feedback and willing to change your approach when new information emerges.
• You're comfortable working across different parts of the stack and learning new technologies.
• You care more about finding the best solution than proving your own idea is right.
• You value collaboration, transparency, and shared accountability.

Strong work ethic and positive attitude

• You bring energy, curiosity, and a solutions-oriented mindset to challenging problems.
• You're comfortable with the intensity and occasional extended hours that come with building an early-stage startup.
• You take pride in delivering high-quality work and meeting commitments.
• You remain constructive and focused when deadlines are tight or unexpected problems arise.
• You're motivated by building something meaningful with a small, ambitious team.

Technical qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production applications.
• Proficiency in modern programming languages and frameworks, particularly Python and/or TypeScript.
• Experience working with APIs, databases, distributed systems, or data-intensive applications.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and modern development workflows.
• Ability to independently design, implement, test, and deploy software.
• Experience building AI-powered applications, working with LLMs, or developing data infrastructure is a plus.
• Experience working in early-stage startups or small, high-performing engineering teams is a plus.

We care more about your ability to build, learn, and deliver than your credentials or years of experience.

What success looks like

At Riley, engineering success is measured by the value you deliver, not the number of lines of code you write. You'll be expected to:

• Consistently ship meaningful product improvements and customer-facing features.
• Deliver solutions quickly without compromising critical quality or reliability.
• Take ownership of projects and drive them to completion with minimal supervision.
• Make pragmatic technical decisions that accelerate product development.
• Respond proactively to customer feedback and production issues.
• Continuously improve engineering velocity, product quality, and customer experience.
• Contribute to a high-performing engineering culture built on accountability, speed, and collaboration.

Why join Riley

• Build at the frontier of AI: Work on challenging problems involving enterprise data, context infrastructure, and AI.
• High ownership: Influence architecture, product decisions, and technical direction from day one.
• Direct customer impact: See how your work solves real problems for enterprise customers.
• Work closely with the founders: Help shape the product and engineering culture as the company scales.
• Accelerated learning: Take on meaningful responsibilities and grow rapidly in a fast-moving environment.
• Build something from the ground up: Join a small team creating a new category of infrastructure for enterprise AI.

The kind of engineer who thrives here

You're not someone who needs a perfectly defined ticket, a detailed specification, or weeks of planning before you can start building. You ask the right questions, identify the simplest path to delivering value, and execute.

You understand that shipping something useful today, learning from customers, and improving it tomorrow is often better than spending weeks building something perfect that nobody needs.

You take ownership, move fast, embrace feedback, and care deeply about building products customers love.

If you're an engineer who thinks like a founder, builds like an owner, and measures success by impact, we'd love to meet you.

Apply for this role

[email removed]

San Francisco, CA