Engineering Manager - Engine and Platform

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

Job Description:

The Revolution Needs You We're building the actions runtime that allows AI agents to safely take real-world actions at enterprise scale. As the Engineering Manager for the Engine and Platform, you’ll lead the team responsible for securing and running all the tools LLMs will need - at scale. Why This Is The Opportunity of a Lifetime $166B has been poured into AI reasoning. The models work. But 94% of enterprise agent projects die before production… Why? Because authentication and integration, which were separate problems in the cloud era (Okta MuleSoft), collapsed into one in the agent era. Every agent action requires both auth and integration in the same moment. We're building that unified layer - the actions runtime between agents and every system they need to touch. Auth, tools, and governance in one place. Founder-Market Fit : Our CEO previously founded Stormpath (acquired by Okta), where he created the first Authentication API for developers. Our CTO led the vector database team at Redis and shipped 100 LLM applications. We're MCP contributors who wrote SEP-1036 (URL Elicitation), now the auth standard for the Model Context Protocol. Dream Team : Authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, Redis, Microsoft, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, Airbyte, Disney, and HPE. Four second-time founders on staff. We've built and scaled developer platforms before. Real Traction : $1M ARR in our first year with Fortune 100 customers closed in under 6 months. Massive Market : Identity ($32B in exits) Integration ($24B in exits) were separate in cloud. We're building them together for agents. One layer. One company. Bigger opportunity. Backed By The Best: Our investors backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. 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

Keywords: Arcade, West Sacramento , Engineering Manager - Engine and Platform, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California