Senior Infrastructure Engineer

About Rivia

Rivia is a technology company building a data engine that powers the future of clinical trial intelligence. Rivia was founded on the belief that new drugs can be brought to market more successfully with a fraction of today's capital.

Biotechs are the source of most therapeutic innovation, yet clinical development is constantly constrained by fragmented data and outdated tooling. Rivia unifies clinical trial data at scale through a core engine built as a reusable intelligence layer, comprising hundreds of configurations and trial-specific logic, independent of source structure. This vertical stack of data engine, workflows, and agents creates a distinct advantage in how trials are operated.

Over the past two years, European and US based biotechs running global clinical trials on Rivia have demonstrated measurable impact, from earlier understanding of therapeutic potential to significantly more efficient trial execution. In March 2026, Rivia raised its $15M Series A led by Earlybird Venture Capital.

Rivia’s ambition is to become the standard infrastructure for modern drug development, transforming how trials are executed end-to-end.

About the Role

As Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Rivia, you own the AWS platform that everything runs on: EKS clusters, CI/CD, identity, costs, backups, internal tooling. You are our first dedicated infrastructure hire, embedded in the engineering team and working directly with the CTO. The scope is broad: AWS cost analysis one day, a flaky CI runner or a Keycloak upgrade the next. You fix problems, then automate the cause so they stop coming back. We expect you to work AI-native: leveraging AI agents to elevate our ability to improve security, reduce costs, and resolve performance issues. You work that way by default and keep expanding what the agents can do for us.

Working Model: This role is based on-site in our Zürich office

What excites you

• Full ownership: Owning the complete infrastructure of a company that moves clinical trial data for dozens of customers.
• Fixing things for good: Working through a real backlog and removing root causes so the same problems stop coming back.
• AI-native operations: Directing AI agents to do infrastructure work is already how you operate, and you want an environment that pushes it further.
• Improving a live system: Making an existing platform cheaper, faster, and more reliable step by step, rather than rebuilding it from scratch.
• Defining a function: Shaping what infrastructure at Rivia becomes as the company grows.

Responsibilities

• Own our AWS platform end to end across staging and production: EKS, RDS, MemoryDB/Redis, S3, DynamoDB, IAM, networking.
• Understand and reduce our infrastructure costs, from the Spark data pipeline to backups, and keep unit economics improving as customer volume grows.
• Own CI/CD and developer productivity: faster pipelines, fewer flaky tests, better internal tooling.
• Keep our Kubernetes workloads stable and scalable, including the services behind our AI features.
• Run identity and secrets management: Keycloak, SSO, OIDC.
• Build AI-agent workflows for infrastructure work, such as recurring audits of AWS for cost, security, and performance findings.
• Support external penetration tests and provide infrastructure evidence for ISO 27001 and client audits.
• Document core systems and runbooks so the platform does not depend on any single person.

What Excites us

• Experience as the sole or first infrastructure owner at a startup.
• 5+ years of hands-on infrastructure or DevOps experience with deep AWS expertise, including cost optimization work.
• Production Kubernetes operations experience.
• A proper software engineer: you write production-quality code and can diagnose and fix problems inside application codebases when needed (JVM experience a plus).
• You have owned complex CI/CD end to end (GitHub Actions or equivalent).
• An AI-native way of working: you use agents (Claude Code or similar) for real infrastructure work and can show concrete examples.
• Comfortable being the only infrastructure specialist on the team: self-directed, you find and fix problems without being asked.

Bonus

• Keycloak or similar identity provider operations (OIDC, SSO, secrets management).
• Spark or large-scale data pipeline infrastructure experience.
• Exposure to regulated environments (ISO 27001, audit support).
• Datadog or a comparable observability stack.

Our Values

At Rivia, we are committed to excellence, continuous learning, and the success of both our customers and our team. If you are driven to exceed targets, eager to shape the future of clinical trials, and passionate about making a meaningful difference in the biotech industry, Rivia is the place for you.

• In it to Win it: Approach every challenge with determination, resilience, and a drive, aiming for the best outcomes and solutions.
• Embrace change: We see change as an opportunity for growth, innovation, and improvement, continuously evolving to stay one step ahead
• Why not?: Asking why not, instead of why, allows us to show our curiosity, allowing us to challenge assumptions and explore new possibilities.
• Find the gap: We are curious and we proactively approach identifying opportunities and solving problems before they arise.
• Collective accountability: We are one team, on one mission and we are committed to shared responsibilities and mutual support, enabling trust and collaboration.
• Value add solutions: Know better. Act better. We are dedicated to delivering meaningful and impactful results.