Staff Software Engineer - AI & Platform

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. Alongside that, 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 hybrid 3x a week to our NYC office in NoHo.

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. That means you get startup speed without startup precarity.

• 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

We believe in setting our team up to thrive.

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

• 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. If you only want to work in one layer, this isn't the role
• A JavaScript and TypeScript background. You can come from an adjacent ecosystem, but you should be fluent and happy in JS/TS
• AI-native. You actively use AI tooling in your daily work and you build agentic workflows, evals, and automation into how your team operates. Not just coding assistants
• Scope of impact beyond a single team. You've influenced how engineering works at an org of roughly 20+ engineers, not just shipped well within your own squad
• 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

• 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 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'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

What We Offer:

• In-office lunch and snacks
• 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. As an Arketa employee we see movement as opportunity.
• Parental Leave Policy

For this role, the estimated annual base salary is up to $180,000- $240,000, depending on experience and qualifications. In addition to base pay, we offer equity. We believe in compensating fairly and transparently, and we’re happy to provide more detail during the interview process.