Distributed Systems Engineer

Company: Arcade
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: April 1, 2026

Job Description:

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 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 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. 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 Notes : This is an in-person role located in our San Francisco (SOMA) office. We are not able to sponsor visas to the United States at this time. 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

Keywords: Arcade, Woodland , Distributed Systems Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California