Founding Abuse Engineer

Arena Intelligence, Inc.

1d

About The Position

Arena Intelligence is seeking a Founding Abuse Engineer to take full ownership of platform misuse. The role involves building detection, enforcement, and investigation systems to ensure the trustworthiness of Arena's leaderboards, stop automated abuse across services, and defend against the full spectrum of AI-era harms. This is a foundational builder role where the individual will define strategy, write code, and establish the platform for future abuse, integrity, and trust & safety hires. The engineer will collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, model partners, policy, and leadership, with accountability for maintaining clean leaderboards, catching harmful uses, and ensuring service safety.

Requirements

• 6+ years of production software engineering experience, including building and operating systems under adversarial conditions
• Shipped experience in at least one of: trust & safety, anti-abuse, anti-fraud, anti-spam, integrity, or risk engineering
• Strong SQL and data-analysis skills — this role is 30%+ pattern-finding and investigation, not just shipping code
• Adversarial and investigative mindset — you can articulate a novel attack before designing the defense, and follow evidence when a novel harm surfaces
• High judgment on false-positive cost, user harm, and the reversibility of enforcement actions
• Proficiency in a modern backend language (Node.js, TypeScript, Python, or Go)
• Excellent communication — you'll build alignment with engineering, product, policy, and leadership routinely

Nice To Haves

• Experience with LLM-specific adversarial inputs — jailbreaks, direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-use abuse
• Experience with agent safety, browser-automation abuse, or LLM-API abuse
• Background in securing voting, rating, reputation, or marketplace platforms against coordinated manipulation
• ML or ML-systems experience — feature engineering, online/offline evaluation, label acquisition, drift handling
• Experience building investigator or analyst tooling used by non-engineers
• Contributions to open-source trust & safety, abuse-detection, or adversarial-ML work
• Background in gaming integrity, ad-fraud, or financial-crime engineering at scale

Responsibilities

• Own the abuse vision for Arena: what gets detected, what gets enforced, how fast, and with what false-positive budget
• Design and operate detection for bots, sybils, coordinated inauthentic voting, and rating-system manipulation — the integrity of Arena's leaderboards is the product
• Build enforcement primitives (rate limits, challenges, shadowbans, account actions, model-side refusals) that are reversible, auditable, and humane
• Detect and mitigate inference abuse and cost exploitation at the platform layer
• Build jailbreak and multi-provider misuse detection across the models Arena serves, and partner with model-provider trust & safety teams on signal-sharing and escalation
• Scope and implement abuse monitoring for every new product launch — web search, web fetch, live site deployment, and whatever's next — as part of the launch checklist, not after the fact
• Prototype and mature into production systems of detection, review, and enforcement for the highest-severity harms (CSAM/NCII, violent extremism, self-harm), including the legal reporting pipeline (e.g., NCMEC)
• Build internal investigator tooling so policy, on-call, and future T&S analysts can triage incidents without engineering bottleneck
• Partner with Security on shared surface — account takeover, credential stuffing, API-key abuse, and the identity/behavioral-signal platform
• Partner with policy, legal, and leadership on acceptable-use policy, enforcement escalations, and public-integrity narrative

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where our team members are based.
• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
• The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team
• A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees