Distributed Systems Engineer

Arcade, San Francisco, CA

The role

Everyone's building AI agents, but almost nobody gets them to production.

Building an impressive demo is easy. Building an AI agent that can securely take action inside enterprise systems is hard. The moment an agent accesses customer data, executes a workflow, or makes changes on behalf of a user, authorization, governance, and trust become the real engineering challenge.

Arcade is the MCP runtime that gives agents the power to do both seamlessly. We connect agents to the systems they act in, then give each one a permission slip and a paper trail - proof of what it's allowed to do, and a record of what it did. That's what makes AI safe to turn loose: real actions, on real systems, already shipping inside Fortune 100 companies.

What you will do

Build the infrastructure to manage the backplane for all future AI tools
Design, build, test, and deploy high-performance, secure, production-grade software.
Develop SDKs and frameworks that make it easy for other developers to build custom tools

Why this is the opportunity of a lifetime

Traction: Real deployments with Fortune 100 Fortune customers.
Founder-Market Fit: Our CEO was previously the VP of Products for Okta where he led all developer product, all new products, and overall product strategy. Prior to Okta he founded Stormpath (acquired by Okta), where he created the first Authentication API for developers. He's done this before - and this time the market is 10x bigger. Our CTO led the vector database team at Redis, shipped 100+ LLM applications, and is a contributor to LangChain and LlamaIndex. He knows this space better than anyone.
Dream Team: We've assembled authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, MongoDB, Redis, Microsoft, Meta, Confluent, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, and Airbyt who've built and founded multiple successful developer platforms.
Perfect Timing: Every enterprise is racing to put agents in production - almost none get there. The problem isn't better models, it's proving which agent can take which action, on behalf of which user, against which system. That's us.
Massive Market : We're building critical infrastructure for the biggest technological shift of our generation. Every enterprise agent, whether custom-built on frameworks like LangChain or bought from vendors like Anthropic and Microsoft, needs governed access to the systems it acts in. That's the layer we're building.
Backed By The Best: Our Series A round is led by SYN Ventures, with strategic investment from Cisco, Morgan Stanley, and Wipro. Our earlier investors have also backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see - this is going to be huge.

The Challenge

We are building the runtime and registry for AI/LLM tools. You will define both how AI interacts with the world, and how humans build and manage those tools. This includes creating production-grade integrations, and the services & toolkits that run them... and the solving the unique problems of AI/LLM usage along the way. We are playing on hard-mode: building governance, PaaS, and infrastructure for both on-prem and SaaS deployments at the same time.

This role is primarily focused on our back-end services, but as an early member of a startup, you’ll be working up-and-down the stack. We build our software with Go, Python, and Typescript, and expect you to be a pro in at least one of those. We are looking for people who constantly ship and don't get stuck - we are looking for folks who are always learning and and able to apply that knowledge to their work and teach it to the team.

Distributed Systems Engineer

The role

What you will do

Distributed Systems Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

Nice to have

The revolution needs you

Why this is the opportunity of a lifetime

Join The Movement

Pay and benefits

Notes

Similar jobs at other companies

Founding Member of Technical Staff

Senior AI Engineer

AI Engineer - Backend

AI Engineer - SF

Manager, Engineering, SecureAI

Staff Frontend Engineer, SecureAI

Arcade