Product Engineer, AI

Arcade•Tracy, CA

About The Position

Arcade is building the world’s first AI physical product creation platform, where imagination becomes reality. Our platform lets anyone design, purchase, and sell custom, manufacturable products using natural language and generative AI. We believe everyone should have the power to create physical goods as easily as they post online, and we’re building the infrastructure to make that real for both consumers and businesses. We’ve raised $42M from a world-class group of investors, including Reid Hoffman, Forerunner Ventures (Kirsten Green), Canaan Partners (Laura Chau), Adverb Ventures (April Underwood), Factorial Funds (Sol Bier), Offline Ventures (Brit Morin), Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), Inspired Capital (Alexa von Tobel), and Torch Capital (Jonathan Keidan). Our angel investors include Elad Gil, Ev Williams, Marissa Mayer, Sara Beykpour, Kayvon Beykpour, Anna Veronika Dorogush, Eugenia Kuyda, David Luan, Sharon Zhou, Kelly Wearstler, Karlie Kloss, Colin Kaepernick, Christy Turlington Burns, and Jeff Wilke. Arcade is headquartered in San Francisco’s Presidio and led by serial entrepreneur Mariam Naficy (Minted, Eve), and a mission-driven team from Google, Apple, Stability AI, Glean, NVIDIA, Databricks, LinkedIn, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and more. Arcade’s Chief AI Officer is Varun Jampani, a leading researcher who co-authored Dreambooth and created Stable Diffusion 3.5, among other things. Raghudeep Gadde, Head of Research at Arcade, was formerly a Principal Scientist at Amazon. Together, we’re pioneering a new category at the intersection of AI, personal expression, and on-demand manufacturing, and we’re building fast. Arcade’s Product Engineer, AI role is intended for an individual with extraordinary talent and ambition who wants to build the future of design and commerce AI and who demonstrates founder-mode ownership. You will report directly to our Co-Founder & CEO, Mariam Naficy, and work alongside our engineers, designers, and AI researchers to launch category-defining experiences. The Product Engineer, AI will own critical products from day one. This role is for an engineer who can own outcomes end-to-end, both helping determine what to build, and building it for themselves. The right individual for this role can design agent behavior, write production code, prototype workflows, craft system prompts, debug failures, iterate based on real usage, and manage cross-functional execution at a high-velocity early-stage startup. The ideal candidate is an engineer who is at an inflection point toward product ownership while wanting to stay deeply hands-on.

Requirements

Clear thinker and communicator who brings structure to ambiguity and speak the language of engineers, researchers, and designers alike
High-agency operator who moves fast, takes ownership, and has bias toward impact
Tasteful, low-ego teammate who brings humility, energy, and judgment to every interaction
Strong opinions, loosely held – unafraid to speak your mind, but receptive to new ideas and changing priors
You think beyond execution, and prioritize the most urgent, product-defining problems
Growth mindset – working in AI means constantly learning and re-evaluating your views
A strong product sense and attention to user experience: you care deeply about making products that feel magical, manufacturable, and intuitive
Availability to start in the near term
A Computer Science or Engineering degree, with 2+ years of rigorous software development experience
Experience building agentic workflows in personal, research, or production settings; can design and ship a modern agentic system from end-to-end
Fluency with agent tooling (LangChain or equivalent custom stacks)
Technically fluent builder comfortable reading source code, working in notebooks, and debugging eval pipelines
A demonstrated passion and curiosity for AI: you keep up with trends, emerging innovations, and new applications, and think critically about how to leverage them
Experience building or shipping products: personal projects, internships, startups, or open-source contributions all count
Familiarity with modern AI infrastructure — LLMs (and their limitations), prompt engineering, multimodal/image models, vector databases, and agent frameworks.

Nice To Haves

early-stage startup experience (Seed–Series B), prior founding experience, or significant shipped side projects

Responsibilities

Design and launch work that has real-world impact, cultural visibility, and end-to-end ownership, shaping an entirely new category and product paradigm
Collaborate closely with leading scientists, AI researchers, and designers to integrate cutting-edge models and tools into intuitive, production-ready features
Own end-to-end product workflows from ideation to launch, including user research, technical scoping, coding, and post-launch iteration
Write and maintain system prompts
Design, build and test agentic workflows, LLM chains, and multimodal model calls to power core user actions
Run prompt tuning, tool usage evaluations, and comparative model benchmarks
Prototype, test, and refine generative AI interfaces that make product creation feel magical, personal, and effortless
Implement taste/quality controls, define acceptance thresholds, and instrument on-surface quality metrics to protect user trust at scale