Distributed Systems Engineer

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.

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.

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.
• Dream Team: We've assembled authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, Redis, Microsoft, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, Airbyte, Disney, and HPE.
• Massive Market: We're building critical infrastructure for the biggest technological shift of our generation.
• Backing: Our Series A round is led by SYN Ventures, with strategic investment from Morgan Stanley and Wipro.

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, along with solving the unique problems of AI/LLM usage. We are building a SaaS application first, and then allowing folks to run part of that infrastructure on-site via hybrid deployments.

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.

• 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 (e.g. 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.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of backend development with Python, Go, Ruby, Typescript, or similar.
• 2+ years of infrastructure and deployment experience (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, Llama Index, etc.).
  • Open-source contributions.
  • Experience with high-scale distributed systems.
  • Experience leading teams and mentoring 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.

This is an in-person role located in our San Francisco (SOMA) office.

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