{"id":68223,"url":"https://alion.io/job/river-member-of-technical-staff-software-engineer","title":"Software Engineer, River API","company":{"id":25477,"name":"River AI","domain":"river.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/river-ai","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":20,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":420000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":420000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"InfiniBand","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":true},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-14T00:57:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-20","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T06:52:45Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":175,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":175},"description":"At River AI, our mission is to create personal AI owned and shaped by each individual. To achieve this, we are rewriting the entire stack from scratch: personal hardware for local inference, bespoke training infrastructure, next-generation UIs, and frontier deep learning research.\nWho we are\nWe are scientists, engineers, and builders from the industry's top tech companies and AI labs. We bring a proven track record of scaling consumer systems for hundreds of millions of users and architecting the pre-training infrastructure behind today's frontier models.\nAbout the Role\nWe 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.\nYou 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.\nWhat You’ll Do\nArchitect and deploy fault-tolerant distributed systems for training and inference workloads across clusters with thousands of nodes.\nDesign high-performance kernels to maximize tensor operation efficiency, memory throughput, and networking over InfiniBand/RDMA.\nProfile systems end-to-end to resolve blockers across hardware, software, data loading pipelines, and collective communication primitives.\nPartner directly with research scientists to rapidly implement, optimize, and scale experimental model architectures.\nSkills & Qualifications\nMinimum Qualifications:\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical industry experience.\nDeep expertise in systems-level languages (C, C++, or Rust) with a track record of writing performant, maintainable code.\nStrong foundation in computer architecture, memory management, and concurrent programming.\nExceptional debugging skills, especially when tackling complex, non-deterministic issues in distributed environments.\nA highly collaborative mindset and a bias for action to push boundaries across the stack.\nPreferred Qualifications: (We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all of these)\nHands-on experience with modern AI frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX) and tooling for large-scale model training.\nDeep familiarity with modern GPU architectures (NVIDIA/AMD) and hardware constraints (HBM bandwidth, PCIe limits).\nA proven track record of shipping and maintaining high-performance distributed systems or low-level software libraries.\nLogistics & Benefits\nLocation: Palo Alto, California.\nCompensation: Depending on experience and skills the expected base pay is $200,000 - $420,000 USD per year, plus equity.\nBenefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance; 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