Engineering Manager - Tool Development and Developer Experience

Arcade•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

We're building the actions runtime that allows AI agents to safely take real-world actions at enterprise scale. As the Engineering Manager for Tool Development & Developer Experience, you'll lead the team responsible for our MCP framework, tool catalog, and the systems that let customers build powerful tools of their own. 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: Make the tools that customers want, and empower customers to build and customize their own tools, with a legible and delightful framework. Arcade’s engineering team is growing! You will be one of our first two engineering managers, responsible for scaling the team owning tool development and developer experience. This is a team of expert agent builders who own arcade-mcp (our MCP server development framework), our catalog of best-in-class MCP servers (docs.arcade.dev/mcp-servers), and the agents we use to build and maintain them. This team also owns the onboarding and education process for Arcade - teaching folks how to use these products and tools. How we scale our catalog 100x, and how we unlock higher-order and more complex tools to be built are at the forefront of this team’s 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 Python and Typescript, and touches our Go platform codebase from time-to-time. This role reports to the Head of Engineering. The ideal candidate for this role is already an expert in building AI applications, and building integrations to 100s of distinct services. Agent-experience design is not a new concept for you, nor is navigating the APIs, rate limits, and authentication strategies for optimized LLM tools.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in engineering leadership.
Proven success managing and scaling high-performing teams.
Deep experience building integrations and/or data platforms at scale.
Successfully deployed Agents and LLM/AI tools to production.
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.

Nice To Haves

Open-source contributions
You’ve been at an early-stage startup before and loved it
Python and/or Typescript expertise

Responsibilities

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 initially manage a team of 4 engineers, with plans to grow to a team of 8 by the end of the year.
Define and deliver the next most important MCP servers 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.

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