Director of Core Platform Engineering

Job description

ABOUT ARCADE 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. THE ROLE We’re early and moving fast. The core platform is the backbone of Arcade: order management, fulfillment pipelines, pricing engine, and manufacturer operations that sit underneath everything we ship. We need someone to own this system end to end — and make it robust, scalable, and built to last. We’re hiring a Director of Core Platform Engineering to own Arcade’s mission critical commerce and operations infrastructure. This is a leadership role – you’ll work directly with our CEO and product leadership, and be the point person in charge of architecting, implementing, and evolving this system to scale to millions of end users. SOME CONCRETE PROBLEMS YOU’LL OWN - Platform architecture. Enforce clean APIs, horizontally scalable microservices, and modern deployment practices. Create the foundation that allows our entire engineering org to ship fast. - Order fulfillment pipeline. End-to-end order lifecycle from checkout through manufacturer fulfillment — webhooks, status tracking, notifications, and more across a global supply chain. - Real-time pricing engine. Dynamic pricing across a wide variety of product categories. Volume discounts, drop-ship surcharges, and — all exposed as clean, reliable backend APIs for both internal and external stakeholders. - AI inference workloads. Arcade runs image generation jobs at scale. You’ll own the infrastructure that makes these jobs reliable, cost-efficient, and production-grade — think batching, parallelization, auto-scaling, and observability. - Client SDK and MCP. Own the integration layer that allows developers to build applications on top of Arcade — think product creation, order lifecycle management, authentication, and billing. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years of backend engineering experience. You’ve built and owned production systems that processed real transactions at scale. You’ve seen growing pains going from 0-1, and 1-100, and know how to solve them. - Commerce or marketplace experience. You’ve worked with order management, fulfillment pipelines, payment systems, or multi-sided marketplace infrastructure. Shopify ecosystem experience is a bonus. - Strong systems instincts. You think in APIs, schemas, and service boundaries. You know how to build for long term maintainability and scalability. You’re the person who catches issues before they become a production incident. - You simplify things. You look at a complex system and see the unnecessary parts. You have a bias toward fewer moving pieces, typed data, and clean contracts. - Comfortable with ambiguity. The product is moving fast. You’ll make architectural decisions before every requirement is clean — and you’ll make good ones. Nice to have: - Expert-level proficiency in Typescript and/or Python. - Familiarity with scaled GPU inference infrastructure. - Background in multi-tenant SaaS, subscription/metering systems, or volume pricing engines. - Interest in design, art, or physical goods — Arcade lives at the intersection of all three. WHAT YOU’LL GET - Compensation: Top-of-market base salary plus meaningful early-stage equity — a level of ownership you cannot get at a large company. - Ownership: You will own the system that every order flows through. As the platform scales, your architecture and technical decisions will directly shape the company's future. - Mentorship: Direct collaboration with Mariam Naficy (CEO, founder of Minted and Eve) and Michael Mader (Head of Product), plus access to senior advisors who have built commerce systems at scale. - Learning velocity: Twelve months at Arcade will teach you more than three years anywhere else. We mean that literally. - Mission: You’ll help artists and makers build real businesses on top of AI — not help advertisers target more people. That matters. ADDITIONAL - Competitive compensation - Lunch provided daily - Company events Arcade is an equal opportunity employer. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and supportive team, and to creating a platform where anyone, anywhere, can make something meaningful.