Engineering Manager - Engine and Platform

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $179K – $285K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Everyone's talking about AI. But here's the truth: ChatGPT can't send your emails. It can't book your flights. It can't even order you lunch.

Why? Because AI is trapped in a chat box. It can't take real actions in the real world.

We are changing that forever. We're not just building another AI company - we're creating the infrastructure that will power every AI application you'll use in the future.

The Revolution Needs You

Every AI app needs agentic "tools" - special functions 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 and tool-calling platform 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

• 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 : We're at the inflection point of AI adoption. The biggest problem isn't better models - it's connecting AI to real-world actions. 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 investors have backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see - this is going to be huge.

The Challenge

Team Charter: Build, maintain, and deploy the runtime for customers to run, manage, secure, and understand AI tools, enabling advanced agentic use-cases.

Arcade’s engineering team is growing! You will be one of our first two engineering managers, responsible for scaling the team owning the development of our platform and services. This is a team of distributed systems engineers and authorization/identity experts who build our platform and features like MCP gateways, tenant and project roles and permissions, and the platform-as-service for tool executions that powers arcade-deploy. Given our upmarket customer base, this team also invests in security and compliance, as well as the integrations our self-hosted enterprise customers need. Building the one-stop platform for the enterprise to run and manage all of their tools safely and easily is the mission.

We expect that you’ll spend most of your time leveling-up the team, ensuring the team is unblocked, and aligning the team’s work with our product organization… but you still are excited to get your hands dirty in the code when possible. While this is primarily a people, product, and operations leadership role, we expect you to stay technically engaged through reviews, critical-path contributions, and occasional hands-on coding when it meaningfully unblocks the team. We have a team of A-players today, and we need you to scale up our capacity without losing our culture, our heart, or our velocity.

This role involves navigating ambiguity, evolving standards in the AI tools ecosystem (e.g. the MCP specification, which we contribute to), and the challenges of scaling fast without sacrificing quality at an early startup. This team works primarily in Go, Typescript, and Python, and touches our Python tools/MCP-servers codebase from time-to-time. This role reports to the Head of Engineering.

The ideal candidate for this role is already an expert in enterprise-grade platforms and/or security products. You’ve previously built self-hosted products for enterprises and managed large-scale SaaS deployments. You are invested in the AI revolution and have strong opinions on what it means to roll out safe AI products at scale.

What You'll Do

• Be ultimately responsible for the deliverables, stability, and uptime of your team, and empowered to ramp up these goals as the team grows and matures.

• Ensure a consistent product vision and architecture for the team, and help shape the team & company roadmap - you will be the primary owner of technical direction, prioritization, and execution for the team’s work, in close partnership with Product and the founders.

• Hire and Mentor talented engineers and help shape their technical and career growth. You’ll be managing a team of 6 very senior engineers, many of whom have been startup CTOs themselves, with the goal of growing to a team of 8 by the end of the year.

• Define and deliver the next most important platform features for our customers.

• Ship high-impact features at scale while ensuring reliability, security, and enterprise readiness.

• Build leverage into the system - Transform week-long tasks into minutes through automation and agents.

Required Skills

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in engineering leadership.

• Proven success managing and scaling high-performing teams.

• Deep experience deploying and monitoring software both as a SaaS platform and on-prem.

• Strong architectural instincts and ability to align technical direction with business outcomes.

• Passion for building frameworks that empower other developers to win.

• Excellent communication skills and cross-functional leadership.

• Comfort using LLMs/AI throughout all parts of the software development lifecycle.

• An insatiable desire to ship and continuously improve.

Bonus Points

• Open-source contributions

• You’ve been at an early-stage startup before and loved it

• Go and/or Typescript expertise

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.

Salary Range

$179,000-$285,000 USD