Agent Engineer

About Arcade

Arcade is building the world’s first AI physical product creation platform, where imagination becomes reality. Our platform lets anyone design, purchase, and sell custom, manufacturable products using natural language and generative AI. We believe everyone should have the power to create physical goods as easily as they post online, and we’re building the infrastructure to make that real.

We’ve raised $42M from a world-class group of investors, including Reid Hoffman, Forerunner Ventures (Kirsten Green), Canaan Partners (Laura Chau), Adverb Ventures (April Underwood), Factorial Funds (Sol Bier), Offline Ventures (Brit Morin), Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), Inspired Capital (Alexa von Tobel), and Torch Capital (Jonathan Keidan). Our angel investors include Elad Gil, Ev Williams, Marissa Mayer, Sara Beykpour, Kayvon Beykpour, Anna Veronika Dorogush, Eugenia Kuyda, David Luan, Sharon Zhou, Kelly Wearstler, Karlie Kloss, Colin Kaepernick, Christy Turlington Burns, and Jeff Wilke.

Arcade is headquartered in San Francisco’s Presidio and led by serial entrepreneur Mariam Naficy (Minted, Eve), and a mission-driven team from Google, Apple, Stability AI, Glean, Sierra, NVIDIA, Databricks, LinkedIn, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and more. We’re pioneering a new category at the intersection of AI, personal expression, and on-demand manufacturing, and we’re building fast.

Role Summary

Agent Engineers at Arcade build and evolve the AI agent systems that power consumer product creation, from prompt orchestration and tool selection to reliability, latency, and on-surface quality. You'll design and implement agent architecture, develop and optimize system prompts and tool integrations, run fast experiments, and ship features like chat onboarding vs compose flows, human-in-the-loop handoffs, and SMS entry points, working tightly with product, design, and research to deliver magical, manufacturable outcomes for users. You'll also build analytics, traces, and guardrails to ensure the agent is fast, stable, and trustworthy at scale.

Engineers at Arcade own critical systems from day one, prototyping novel architectures, building production infrastructure, and driving cross-functional execution at the speed of a high-velocity early-stage startup.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain the consumer agent experience end-to-end, including system prompt development, tool orchestration, routing, and on-surface UX for agent-assisted creation and editing.
• Engineer multi-channel entry points (including SMS) with instrumentation to measure conversion, delight, and time-to-first-success.
• Own latency, reliability, and safety: set targets, debug traces, harden tool calls, and architect refactors to improve agent systems and stability.
• Build rigorous evaluation infrastructure and testing harnesses for prompts, tools, and models; version agent configs, implement A/B testing frameworks, and maintain prompt hygiene and CICD discipline.
• Implement quality gates and safety controls to protect user trust while maintaining fast iteration.

What We’re Looking For

Arcade engineers are individuals who have accomplished remarkable things, want to immerse themselves fully in AI engineering, and possess an unrivaled work ethic. We're looking for:

• Software engineer with hands-on experience building AI-agent features, prompt/tool chains, or agentic systems in production.
• Deep technical fluency across LLMs, multimodal models, prompt engineering, and agent frameworks; comfortable reading traces and debugging tool calls.
• Obsessive about reliability and speed and make pragmatic tradeoffs to hit parity with best-in-class agent experiences.
• Experimental and data-driven; you build evals, run A/B tests, and use metrics to guide prompt, tool, and UX iteration.
• Clear communicator and partner to product, research, and design; you turn ambiguity into working systems and shipped code.
• Tasteful, low-ego teammate who balances magical experiences with manufacturability and real-world constraints.

What You Bring

• A background in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• Availability to start in the near term
• Experience building or shipping software: personal projects, internships, startups, or open-source contributions all count
• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or similar languages used in modern AI/ML stacks
• Familiarity with modern AI agent systems and infrastructure: LLMs, multimodal models, vector databases, or agent frameworks
• A strong engineering sensibility and attention to user experience: you care deeply about making products that feel magical and intuitive
• Clear thinking, fast learning, and a deep curiosity about the future of design, manufacturing, and creativity
• Experience with system prompt development, tool selection/orchestration, and evaluation frameworks (e.g., traces, replay harnesses, offline evals)
• Familiarity with agent stacks and observability (e.g., LangGraph or similar, prompt versioning, analytics pipelines)
• Experience building chat-based and compose-style creation flows, including human-in-the-loop handoffs, payments, and trust signals
• Comfort working in fast-moving environments; you thrive on weekly iteration, principled tradeoffs, and end-to-end ownership
• Bonus: experience as a startup founder, in early-stage startups, or in creator platforms and marketplace ecosystems