Senior Software Engineer – AI Systems & Architecture
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- Item Alignment is recruiting on an exclusive retainer for this job.
Contents
Senior Software Engineer – AI Systems & Architecture. 1
About Silk River. 1
The Role. 2
Key Responsibilities. 2
Required Qualifications. 2
Preferred Qualifications. 3
What This Role Is Not 3
Why This Role. 3
Ideal Candidate Summary. 4
Senior Software Engineer – AI Systems & Architecture
Location: United States (Remote or Hybrid)
-Applicant MUST be on the East Coast. We will relocate, with pack and move costs only
-Preferred location is Northern, NJ
Reports to: CTO
Company: Silk River, Inc.
Compensation: Competitive cash + meaningful equity
-Estimated salary range of $125,000 to $210,000 based on experience.
-This is a rare opportunity for a key individual contributor to participate in Equity. Thus if the company goes public or is sold, you could make significant $.
-Our team is experienced as we have several Board members that having taken software companies public before.
About Silk River
Silk River is building an advanced AI platform that modernizes complex, regulated workflows using agent-based systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent orchestration. Our technology integrates with existing enterprise platforms to improve speed, accuracy, and decision quality without replacing core systems.
We are an early-stage company with real customers and production deployments, focused on building durable, well-engineered systems.
The Role
We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to take significant responsibility for both hands-on development and system architecture of our AI platform. This is a builder role for someone who wants ownership, scope, and long-term impact.
You will report to the CTO and work closely with product and engineering leadership to design, build, and scale production AI systems. You will write code daily and contribute meaningfully to architectural decisions.
This role is well suited to a strong engineer with approximately five years of experience who operates above their experience level.
Key Responsibilities
• Design and implement scalable backend systems for AI-driven applications
• Build and maintain AI pipelines, including LLM integrations and RAG pipelines
• Develop and own production services end-to-end
• Contribute to architecture decisions, documentation, and design reviews
• Implement guardrails, monitoring, and evaluation for AI outputs
• Deploy and operate systems in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Collaborate closely with the CTO, product team, and external partners
Required Qualifications
• Minimum five years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong backend development skills in Java (preferred) or Python
• Proven experience building and operating production systems
• Hands-on experience with LLMs in real applications
• Experience with RAG pipelines and embedding-based retrieval
• Solid understanding of system design, databases, and cloud-native development
- Strong Vector database experience, preferably with Weaviate
• Comfortable owning systems in production
B.S. In Computer Science or a related major required. Masters Degree preferred.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience in regulated environments (fintech, healthcare, govtech)
• Familiarity with agent-based or multi-agent systems
• Startup or small-team experience
• Exposure to SOC-2 or compliance-aware system design
What This Role Is Not
• Not a research-only or academic ML role
• Not a pure prompt-engineering position
• Not a narrowly scoped big-company engineering job
- This is NOT a management role. If you are looking for a Project Management or People Management role, this is NOT the role for you. To fit this role you must love being hands-on and staying at the leading edge of these technologies.
This role requires writing real code, owning real systems, and making practical design decisions.
Why This Role
• Meaningful ownership of core AI systems
• Close collaboration with the CTO
• Broad technical scope and responsibility
• Equity participation aligned with long-term impact. This is something that makes us truly different. We do not only have the vision of a great product and company. We have the C Suite Leadership and experience that have taken a company public on the NYSE before. This could be a once in a lifetime opportunity for a bright, truly dedicated Engineer with the right skills. SIGNIFICANT EQUITY PARTICIPATION.
• Opportunity to build durable, production-grade AI systems
Ideal Candidate Summary
A strong software engineer with approximately five years of experience who has built and owned production systems, has hands-on experience with modern AI architectures, and is motivated by ownership, responsibility, and long-term equity.
All applicants must be US Citizens or Lawful permanent residents.
**There is a full background check done before any formal offer is extended. Advise us of ANY arrests or convictions when applying***
*** If you are on an H1B, F1, or F1 OPT, or F1 STEM Visa, list this on your resume with visa expiration date. Send a copy of your visa when applying. We are not completely ruling this out ***