Distributed Systems Engineer
Arcade· startup· Computer Software· May 13, 2026 · 6mo agoPosted 167 days ago
San Francisco, CA
In office
Full-time
Senior
$160K–$220K est.
7+ years exp
Before you apply
Ghost Signal:
Open since May 13, 2026 — 167 days, and still accepting applications.
Job description
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.
THE REVOLUTION NEEDS YOU
Every AI app needs agentic tools that let AI models take real actions. Without tools, AI can only chat. With tools, AI can actually do things. We're building the definitive tools catalog, actions platform, and governance model that will unlock AI's true potential. Think Zapier for AI Actions. Think Auth0 for AI. Think really big.
WHY THIS IS THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME
- Traction: Real deployments with Fortune-100 customers like Morgan Stanley and Open Table
- Founder-Market Fit: Our CEO previously 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, Redis, Microsoft, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, Airbyte, Disney, and HPE 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 AI app will need what we're building.
- Backed By The Best: Our Series A round is led by SYN Ventures, with strategic investment from 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.
What You'll 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
- Help set industry standards for tool calling and authorization (for example, we helped write the MCP authorization spec)
- Create integrations with major platforms and LLMs (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, OpenAi, Anthropic, etc.)
- Shape the roadmap for the team
- Build leverage (via AI) - projects that take a week today should take a day next time.
- Share your work with our customers and community, building our (and your) brand.
Required Skills
- An insatiable desire to ship.
- 7+ years of software engineering experience comprising of:
- 5+ years of backend development experience with either Python, Go, Ruby, Typescript, or a similar language and API & Web frameworks.
- 2+ years of experience with infrastructure and deployment (AWS/GCP, Terraform, Helm, etc)
- Strong experience building and maintaining production APIs.
- Track record of writing clean, well-documented, well-tested code.
- User-centered approach to designing developer-centric products and tools.
Bonus Points
- Experience building developer tools or SDKs
- Familiarity with LLMs and AI frameworks (Langchain, LlamaIndex, etc)
- Open-source contributions
- Experience with high-scale distributed systems
- Experience leading teams and mentoring more junior developers
- Familiarity with Typescript and a relevant frontend framework (e.g. React)
- You’ve been a startup founder or early-state startup employee before and love it
Join The Movement
We're not just building a product - we're leading a movement to transform AI from just chatbots to agents that can take actions against real systems. This is your chance to be at the forefront of that revolution.
If you want to look back in 5 years and say, "I helped build that", then we want to talk to you. Ready to make AI actually useful? Apply Now
Compensation and Benefits
This role offers a competitive salary, equity, and benefits. Compensation is aligned with the range below and determined based on a candidate's background, experience, and performance.
Compensation: Starting at $230,000 base salary, plus equity and competitive benefits.
Notes:
- This is an in-person role located in our San Francisco (SOMA) office.
Application prep
Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.
Keywords to mirror
aiapillmgopythontypescriptawsgcpreact
- Platform
- ashby
- Effort
- quick