Front-End Engineer

About Rivet

Rivet is an AI-native accounting firm. In less than 3 years, we've built a T500 firm in the US, combining corporate and personal income tax, sales tax, R&D credits, and bookkeeping into a single, all-inclusive experience that eliminates the worst parts of tax season for real businesses and the people who run them.

Our platform is designed to feel invisible: it guides clients through their tax to-dos, automates the drudgery for preparers, and gets out of the way when it's not needed. We measure success in time saved and returns completed, not vanity usage metrics. We run Rivet (the firm) on Rivet (the platform) because owning the stack makes it possible to deeply embed AI into every step of our workflows, far more than our competition will ever be able to relying on third-party/off-the-shelf tooling.

Our team of 75 supports more than 1,300 clients, including some of the most innovative companies in the US — Cursor, Cognition, and ModRetro — and their executives, investors, and employees.

And while we may have just gotten started a little over two years ago, this isn't our first rodeo:

• Nick Abouzeid (cofounder & CEO) comes from Ramp, where he ran three of their Growth teams from $100M → $600M in ARR

• Kyle Christenson (cofounder & Head of Tax) comes from the IRS, where he spent six years as an auditor before leaving to start his own firm over a decade ago

We're well-funded, growing quickly, and sustainable. We've raised over $7M to date, from investors like XYZ Ventures, Susa Ventures, Haystack Ventures, and 40+ executives from Ramp, Anduril, Physical Intelligence, & more.

Why this role is different

The product is the only part of tax season most of our clients ever see, and it runs through one design engineer today. Every module's back-end owner pairs with him on the UI, which makes him the shared dependency for every screen we ship. You'd be the second, and the two of you would split it.

• Ownership from first commit to production. Engineers design, build, ship, and maintain their work — no handoffs, no middle-management mazes.

• Decisions happen at the edge. Engineers talk to clients and tax preparers directly. We optimize for speed and context, not committee consensus.

• Clear is kind. We surface problems early, talk about tradeoffs openly, and don't sugarcoat. We're kind by being honest, not by being vague.

• Pragmatic stacks. We pick tools that solve real problems. If it doesn't help us ship faster, safer, or better, we don't use it.

• Skin in the game. We ship things we'd be proud to put our name on — and if something breaks, we own it and fix it fast.

Our stack

Six engineers today, five languages. You'd live mostly in the first two:

• Frontend: React and TanStack, deployed to Cloudflare Workers. Typed clients generated from protobuf.

• Platform: Go, as a modular monolith — Connect RPC over protobuf, Go Fx for wiring, sqlc and goose against Postgres, River Pro for background jobs, Watermill for pub-sub over RabbitMQ.

• AI and eval: Python, in their own repos — ModelBridge (a gRPC service for AI building blocks) and TaxBench, our internal eval suite.

• Legacy integration: a C# Windows agent that drives Drake, one of the tax platforms our industry never built APIs for.

• Infrastructure: AWS — ECS Fargate, Amazon MQ, AMP, Loki, Tempo — provisioned by Pulumi, itself written in Go.

• Around the edges: Buildkite for CI, OpenTelemetry throughout, Doppler for secrets, Linear for tracking.

What you'll do

• Drive on our client-facing surface area end to end — the portal where clients hand over documents, answer questions, and watch a return move toward filed. Design, build, ship, and keep it working.

• Build the workspace our preparers live in all day. Roughly 75 accountants use our internal tooling for eight hours a day, four months a year. Speed and clarity are the whole product for them.

• Work closely with Anton, our design engineer, and the rest of our engineering team. Back-end isn't off-limits - you'll have the ability to build and influence how our entire product is built from end-to-end.

• Ship AI into the interface, not around it. Extraction, review, and suggestion flows only work if the UI makes it obvious what the model did and where a human needs to look.

• Talk to the people using it. Accountants are in our Slack; clients are one call away. Watch someone use what you built before you decide it's done.

We're fully distributed — but if you want an office, we'll help you find one through our investor network.

What makes you a fit

• 4+ years building production web applications, primarily in React

• Have owned a product surface end to end, including the parts after launch

• Can read and write enough backend code to unblock yourself rather than filing a ticket and waiting

• Care about the unglamorous parts — loading states, error handling, what happens on a bad connection with a 40MB PDF

• Comfortable operating in a fast-changing, early-stage environment

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Nice to haves

• Production experience with TanStack (Query, Router, Table)

• Deployed to the edge — Cloudflare Workers or similar

• Worked with generated clients from protobuf, gRPC, or Connect RPC

• Built document-heavy or upload-heavy interfaces, where files are large, messy, and occasionally encrypted

• Strong design sense, especially if you've shipped without a dedicated designer

• Built internal tools for operators who sit close enough to tell you what's broken

• Built tax-adjacent software — fund administration, payroll, accounting platforms, filing systems, anywhere a wrong number has consequences

What we offer

• Benefits and meaningful equity

• A fully remote team, plus twice-yearly company offsites

• A well-funded, fast-moving environment with minimal layers of management

• A world-class client base that values your time and pays for the premium experience

• The chance to build production-grade software your teammates use and love every day

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification. Strong candidates rarely check every box.