[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer, AI & Platform @Arketa

Role Description

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to build AI products our customers can feel, and to make the team around you faster while you do it.

• Your first big surface is a customer-facing AI product that takes meaningful operational work off a studio owner's plate and helps them grow.
• You'll help modernize core parts of our architecture, and build the agentic loops, CI, and observability that let a small team ship at a fast pace.
• This is a product engineering role first. Internal tooling and developer experience are how you multiply the team, not the destination.
• Our customers are small business owners whose livelihoods depend on what you ship, so the feedback loop is short and the stakes are real.
• This is a permanent individual contributor role. There is no management track, by design.
• This role is remote based out of the U.S.

About the team

• You'll join a small, senior, fully distributed engineering team.
• We operate with high autonomy and very little process: a customer asks for something Monday, it's built Tuesday, shipped Wednesday, and we're reading their feedback by Friday.
• You can form a hypothesis, ship a small experiment, measure it, and iterate without waiting for permission.
• We're an outlier in our industry in how aggressively we use AI tooling, and this role sets the pattern for everyone else.
• You'll partner directly with our engineering leaders on technical direction, and you'll mentor mid and junior engineers who will look to you for how the work gets done.
• We've grown roughly over the past two years and we're financially disciplined, maintaining lots of runway.

What You'll Do

• Build AI products that let studio operators automate their operations so they can focus on the parts of their business they're most passionate about.
• Build agentic loops that improve the product, our codebase, our internal systems, and our ability to deliver for customers.
• Position us to get the most out of AI models as they continue to improve.
• Simplify our infrastructure and operations to make both our human and agent engineers faster.
• Improve our operational rigor and automated safety nets: detecting, alerting on, and responding to issues in production.
• Work across the stack (TypeScript, Node, NestJS, React, Postgres) to ship features and improvements daily.
• Mentor mid and junior engineers, and partner with engineering leadership to establish patterns the whole team adopts.
• Be accountable not just for your own output, but for how you help the team deliver more.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: Ship to production in your first week and keep shipping; build working context on our stack, the migrations in flight, and where our biggest reliability gaps are; land one self-contained win that makes the team measurably faster.
• First 90 days: You've altered the way our engineers work, in a positive way, and introduced AI-powered capability the team didn't have before; a meaningful piece of customer-facing AI functionality is in front of real studios.
• First 6 months: You're seen as a model staff engineer here, and other engineers name you as a source they learn from; the patterns, safety nets, and tooling you've built are load-bearing for how the team ships.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience in most cases, though we care more about evidence than years.
• Full-stack contributor.
• Deep expertise somewhere is great, but everyone here contributes across the stack.
• A JavaScript and TypeScript background.
• AI-native: you actively use AI tooling in your daily work and you build agentic workflows, evals, and automation into how your team operates.
• Scope of impact beyond a single team.
• A track record of leading successful migrations.
• Experience designing systems for reliability: observability, alerting, incident response.
• A history of influencing beyond your own work, including setting technical direction, establishing patterns others adopt, and raising the bar through code review, pairing, and mentorship.
• Strong product judgment: you can take an ambiguous customer problem, scope it pragmatically, and ship in small increments.
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and low process, creating the right amount of structure rather than waiting for it.

Bonus

• You care about wellness and fitness personally.
• You've built for entrepreneurs or small business owners before, or perhaps you’ve been one yourself.
• You’ve spent time both within a larger, established engineering org and within a high-growth startup.

You Should Apply If

• You want to build for small business owners and care about how your work shows up in their day to day.
• You want to stay hands-on at the staff level and go deeper as an IC, not move into management.
• You are drawn to the mission of making wellness more accessible.

You May Not Want to Apply If

• You're looking for a path into people management in the next 12 to 18 months. This role is IC by design.
• You want to work in one layer of the stack only.
• You'd want to move us onto a different language or ecosystem.
• You see AI tooling as a nice-to-have rather than a core part of how you work.
• You want clearly scoped tickets, a defined roadmap, and a design doc before code.
• You want a slower pace or a more established later-stage environment.

Benefits

• Ownership and Opportunity for Advancement.
• Competitive Salary and Stock Options.
• Unlimited PTO: our policy is designed to give you the flexibility to rest, recharge, and take care of personal needs — while staying aligned with your team and responsibilities.
• Medical, dental and vision health insurance.
• Fitness Class Reimbursement: we’re committed to supporting both employee wellness and our industry relationships.
• Parental Leave Policy.
• For this role, the estimated annual base salary is up to $180,000- $220,000, depending on experience and qualifications. In addition to base pay, we offer equity.