Staff Software Engineer, AI & Platform

Arketa•New York, NY

1d•$180,000 - $240,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Arketa is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build AI products and enhance the engineering team's speed. This product engineering role focuses on creating customer-facing AI solutions that reduce operational burdens for studio owners and drive business growth. The engineer will also modernize core architecture and implement agentic loops, CI, and observability to support rapid, high-quality shipping. The role emphasizes direct customer impact, as the feedback loop is short and the stakes are high for small business owners. This is a permanent individual contributor position with no management track. The role is hybrid, requiring 3 days a week in the NYC office.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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