AI Engineer (Founding Role)

Company Description

Upriver is building the first Autonomous Data Engineer: an AI teammate that understands your data platform and automates data engineering workflows end-to-end. Founded by Talpiot alumni and backed by leading data and AI investors, we’ve recently closed our seed round, are scaling fast, and already work with paying customers like Unity and Bright Data.

We’re looking for a Founding AI Engineer to build and define the research function at Upriver from zero. This is a rare opportunity to work on some of the hardest unsolved problems in applied AI and agents, with massive ownership, visibility, and room to grow into leadership quickly.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the AI domain at Upriver: Take ownership of our agent architecture and help define its next phases, standards, and direction.
• Solve hard, unsolved problems: Work on challenges in AI agents, reasoning over complex systems, and autonomous decision-making that don’t yet have clear playbooks.
• Build production AI: Design, implement, evaluate, and deploy AI systems used by real customers.
• Be outward-facing: Publish technical blogs, benchmarks, and papers; represent Upriver in the AI and data community.
• Move fast with autonomy: Own problems end-to-end with minimal guidance, working directly with founders.
• Deliver real customer value end-to-end: take features from idea to production, see them used by customers, and iterate based on real-world impact.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong background in AI / ML (applied research, systems, or both).
• Experience building or experimenting with hands-on software development.
• Comfortable operating independently and making foundational technical decisions.
• Strong communication skills and interest in writing, publishing, and sharing work publicly.
• High ambition and desire to grow into a technical leadership role.
• Extra: Hands-on experience experimenting with large language models (LLMs)

Why Upriver

• Define a new category: Be part of a team figuring out how AI agents actually work inside real data platforms, and build a category leader product.
• High ownership, high trust: You’ll make real architectural and product decisions early on.
• Top-tier team: Work with exceptional engineers at a very high bar.
• Join at the inflection point: Strong early traction, a fresh seed round, and the opportunity to grow rapidly with the company as it scales.