---
title: 'Senior AI Engineer at Rivia'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-engineer-rivia-zurich-e7zsaqyd65jh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Senior AI Engineer at Rivia

- **Company:** Rivia
- **Location:** Zurich, Switzerland
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/rivia/am9icG9zdDrp-5CWH9JwQAafMRJP1mbc

## Job description

## About Rivia

[Rivia](http://rivia.com/) 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the source of most therapeutic innovation, yet clinical development is constantly constrained by fragmented data and outdated tooling.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 AI Engineering at Rivia

Given the highly complex nature of clinical trials and how they interface with our technology, the AI Engineering team at Rivia is pivotal in ensuring our clients achieve their desired outcomes and derive maximum value from our platform. The team designs and operates agentic, production-grade AI workflows that power critical monitoring, data quality, and insight-generation capabilities for clinical trial stakeholders.​ By building reliable, auditable, and scalable AI systems, AI Engineering helps transform fragmented clinical data into actionable intelligence and positions Rivia as the AI-first platform for clinical trial intelligence.

## The Role

As a Senior AI Engineer at Rivia, you will architect and ship high-impact AI workflows that materially improve how clinical trial teams monitor studies, assess data quality, and make operational decisions.​ You will work as a key technical contributor embedded in product initiatives, owning AI features end-to-end from design and evaluation through to deployment, observability, and continuous improvement.​ The ideal candidate is a product-minded engineer who combines deep LLM and agentic systems expertise with strong software engineering skills, a bias to action, and a passion for turning cutting-edge AI into reliable, commercially impactful products in a complex, regulated domain.

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

What excites you

- Being part of a collaborative startup where you can make a direct impact on the product, the business, and the team.
- Working in a fast-paced environment where you can leverage your AI engineering expertise to solve complex, real-world problems in clinical trials.
- Building AI systems that customers rely on for critical decisions, where trust, traceability, and auditability are essential.
- Owning outcomes end-to-end, driving clarity, momentum, and quality without heavy oversight, and continuously learning and experimenting in the rapidly evolving LLM landscape.

## Responsibilities

- Architect and ship production-grade agentic AI workflows, including tool use, orchestration, planning, memory, and structured outputs, for clinical trial intelligence use cases.
- Translate user workflows and product requirements into pragmatic, measurable AI solutions that work reliably in production and optimize for user and business value.
- Design and maintain evaluation pipelines, including gold sets, metrics, and experiments, and use them to drive iteration with rigor.
- Implement robust LLMOps practices, including tracing, monitoring, cost and latency management, safe deployment, and continuous improvement of AI systems in production.
- Design high-quality retrieval and context pipelines with strong guarantees on correctness, provenance, and auditability, particularly in regulated environments such as clinical trials.
- Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Design, Sales, and Customer teams to ensure AI features are usable, trusted, and commercially impactful.
- Stay deeply current with the LLM ecosystem, actively experiment with new models and tools, and translate innovation into practical product advantage.

What Excites us

- Product mindset, with a demonstrated ability to translate user workflows into pragmatic, measurable AI solutions that work reliably in production
- Deep familiarity with the current LLM ecosystem and active experimentation with new models, tools, and techniques.
- Proven experience building and shipping production-grade AI or agentic systems, ideally in high-stakes or complex domains.
- Strong software engineering skills and comfort owning systems end-to-end, from design to deployment and maintenance.
- Experience going from 0→1 at a VC-backed startup or similarly fast-paced environment.

Hiring Process Our hiring process takes 2-5 weeks over four distinct stages:

- Meet and greet: 30-minute call with the HR team to get to know each other. This is an informal chat.
- Technical Screening: 60-minute interview to delve into high-level technical concepts and your problem-solving approaches.
- Coding Interview: 60 mins with the team to assess your coding skills.
- Get-to-know a founder: 30-minute discussion with Tiago, our CTO, to introduce you to Rivia and discuss the role in detail.
- Meet the team: 3-4 hours. Join us at our Zürich office for a visit that includes a team lunch and an in-depth technical interview to explore our mutual fit.

## 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.

## About Rivia

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Rivia builds a unified intelligence layer for clinical trials, using AI agents to transform fragmented trial data into structured, actionable insights for biotechs and pharmaceutical companies.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Zurich, Switzerland
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Erik Scalfaro (CEO), Tiago Kieliger (CTO), Henk Streefkerk (Chief Medical Officer)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Healthcare IT / Clinical Trial Intelligence
- **Target customers**: Biotech and pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To be the leading unified clinical trial data platform, driving therapeutic innovation through the power of technology. The company’s vision is to help bring new therapies to market at a fraction of today’s cost.

## Products & Services
- **Rivia Core Intelligence Layer**: Unifies fragmented clinical trial data from any vendor or file into a single, structured foundation mapped to protocol logic, visits, and endpoints. Serves as the base for all workflows and agents. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/)
- **Rivia Detect (Agentic Data Quality)**: AI agents that continuously run clinical checks across all data, cluster issues into root causes, propose corrective actions, and automate resolution workflows (e.g., drafting queries, preparing site communication). [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/)
- **Rivia Spark (Visual Intelligence)**: A natural-language interface that transforms user questions into dynamic graphs and cohorts, enabling instant data exploration. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/)
- **Rivia Spark Patient Profile Assistant**: An AI-powered conversational agent embedded in the Patient Profile to answer questions about individual patients regarding adverse events, biomarkers, visits, and trends. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metrics**:
    - **Total Funding**: $18.2M ([linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/rivia-sa))
        - Series A (March 2026): $15M led by Earlybird Venture Capital
        - Seed Round (June 2024): $3.2M led by Speedinvest
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Earlybird Venture Capital (Lead, Series A), Speedinvest (Lead, Seed)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 66.7% year-over-year to 22 employees, with a 500% increase in job postings year-over-year. The platform has been adopted by European and US biotechs running global clinical trials, demonstrating measurable impact in trial execution efficiency and therapeutic understanding.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified data layer**: Rivia’s platform ingests data from any vendor or file format, harmonizing it into reusable, trial-specific models—solving a major fragmentation problem in clinical trials.
- **Agentic AI**: The platform deploys specialized AI agents for data quality, visual intelligence, and patient profiling, moving beyond simple dashboards to autonomous workflow execution.
- **Speed of deployment**: Rivia claims customers can go live in under 20 days by leveraging existing data access methods and automated integration. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/)
- **Deep domain expertise**: Founded by a team combining technical and medical expertise (CEO, CTO, and Chief Medical Officer), giving the product credibility in a highly regulated industry.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the platform**: Growing the team across engineering, AI, sales, and people functions to expand product capabilities and customer reach.
- **Embedding intelligence**: Continuing to develop and refine AI agents that operate across the entire clinical trial lifecycle.
- **Expanding market presence**: Building on existing traction with European and US biotechs to capture a larger share of the clinical trial software market.

## Why Work Here
- **Impactful mission**: Employees are directly involved in accelerating the development of new therapies and getting better treatments to patients faster. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/careers)
- **Culture of ownership and collaboration**: Employee testimonials highlight growth, ownership, and a collaborative environment that encourages continuous learning and innovation. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/careers)
- **Fast-growing startup**: With 66.7% headcount growth, 500% growth in job postings, and a recent $15M Series A, the company is in a strong growth phase.
- **Work policy**: Hybrid model, with primary offices in Zurich, Switzerland, and a smaller presence in Blandford, Massachusetts. Typical time on-site is expected. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rivia)
- **Open roles (as of recent data)**: Senior Frontend (Full-stack) Engineer, Senior AI Engineer, Quality Assurance (Compliance) Manager, Head of People, Account Executive, Senior Backend (Full-stack) Engineer, and Solutions Engineer. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/rivia-sa)

## Sources
1. [rivia.com](https://www.rivia.com/)
2. [rivia.com/about](https://www.rivia.com/about)
3. [rivia.com/careers](https://www.rivia.com/careers)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rivia)
5. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/rivia-sa)
6. [jobs.gem.com/rivia](https://jobs.gem.com/rivia)

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