Lead Software Engineer - Growth

Everyone's talking about AI. But here's the truth: ChatGPT can't send your emails. It can't book your flights. It can't even order you lunch.

Why? Because AI is trapped in a chat box. It can't take real actions in the real world.

We are changing that forever. We're not just building another AI company - we're creating the infrastructure that will power every AI application you'll use in the future.

The Revolution Needs You

Every AI app needs agentic "tools" - special functions that let AI models take real actions. Without tools, AI can only chat. With tools, AI can actually do things. We're building the definitive tools catalog and tool-calling platform that will unlock AI's true potential. Think Zapier for AI Actions. Think Auth0 for AI. Think really big.

Why This Is The Opportunity of a Lifetime

• Founder-Market Fit : Our CEO previously founded Stormpath (acquired by Okta), where he created the first Authentication API for developers. He's done this before - and this time the market is 10x bigger. Our CTO led the vector database team at Redis, shipped 100+ LLM applications, and is a contributor to LangChain and LlamaIndex. He knows this space better than anyone.

• Dream Team : We've assembled authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, Redis, Microsoft, Splunk, Ngrok, Google, Airbyte, Disney, and HPE who've built and founded multiple successful developer platforms.

• Perfect Timing : We're at the inflection point of AI adoption. The biggest problem isn't better models - it's connecting AI to real-world actions. That's us.

• Massive Market : We're building critical infrastructure for the biggest technological shift of our generation. Every AI app will need what we're building.

• Backed By The Best: Our investors have backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see - this is going to be huge.

The Challenge

Growth's charter is simple and hard: build champions for Arcade - agent builders who not only stick around, but advocate for Arcade’s use at their company. That means our entire focus right now is on the earliest part of a developer’s journey: getting someone from the moment they sign up to the moment they’ve built something valuable, as fast as possible.

Arcade's product is powerful; developers who get to real usage love it. The opportunity is making that path effortless. We want every agent builder who signs up to go from zero to connected, authenticated, real-world tool calls as fast as possible, with nothing in their way.

You'll be the technical backbone of a small, agile Growth team. This is not a "manage from the sidelines" role; you'll be writing code across Go, Python, and TypeScript, shipping changes across Arcade's services and frontend, and unblocking team members. You'll own the developer experience from post-signup through activation: onboarding flows, MCP Gateway setup, auth friction, billing surfaces, docs, and the instrumentation to know whether any of it is working.

The team is early. You'll be shaping what Growth engineering looks like at Arcade from the surfaces it owns, to the experiments it runs, and the data infrastructure it needs. Growth owns both the full self-serve lifecycle - activation, retention, expansion, and monetization -and the measurement of success. You'll be building the foundation for all of it.

This role reports to the Engineering Manager for Tools and Growth. At a startup this size, you'll work across the entire company, partnering with the product manager on Tools and Growth, collaborating with Platform and Tools engineering on cross-service dependencies, and working directly with the Head of Marketing and CEO on what moves the needle. If you want broad impact and short feedback loops with the people making decisions, this is that role.

What You'll Do

• Own the technical direction and delivery for Growth engineering: activation flows, onboarding, billing, docs, and developer experience surfaces across the product.

• Ship code daily across the stack - React frontend, Go and Python backend services - while making architecture decisions that hold up as the team scales.

• Lead a small team (1–2 engineers today, growing): unblock them, review their code, and set the technical bar. You'll be IC-heavy at first, coding alongside the team, and gradually shift toward planning, architecture, and technical direction as the team grows.

• Build the experimentation and measurement layer: feature flags, A/B tests, funnel instrumentation, and cohort dashboards so the team can run data-driven activation experiments.

• Reduce time-to-value by identifying and eliminating friction in the MCP Gateway setup, OAuth configuration, onboarding UX, and documentation.

• Navigate cross-team dependencies with Platform and Tools engineering: bring funnel data, propose interface changes, and ship contributions to services you don't own when it unblocks activation work.

• Build leverage by using automation and AI tooling to compress cycle times. Projects that take a week today should take a day next time.

Required Skills

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership (tech lead, staff engineer, or similar - formal title matters less than the work).

• Deep backend and systems expertise - you've built and maintained production APIs, designed database migrations, worked with PostgreSQL, and debugged distributed systems. Go and/or Python experience strongly preferred.

• Architectural fluency across the full stack - you understand how services, frontends, and data layers stitch together to create a product experience. You can translate between backend infrastructure and user-facing surfaces.

• Frontend savvy - you may not be a frontend specialist, but you can read and contribute to a React codebase, give meaningful feedback on UI decisions, and collaborate effectively with frontend engineers.

• Experience working across several services operating independently - you've navigated shared libraries, cross-service dependencies, and coordinated deployments without breaking things.

• A growth or product engineering mindset - you think in funnels, activation metrics, and experiments, not just features. You've measured the impact of what you've shipped.

• Experience leading small teams - code review, technical mentorship, architectural decision-making, and the judgment to know when to build vs. when to cut scope.

• Comfort with ambiguity - pre-PMF, early team, narrow charter that will expand. You make good decisions with incomplete data.

• An insatiable desire to ship.

Bonus Points

• Experience with OAuth/OIDC flows, identity systems, or auth infrastructure

• Familiarity with the MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem or similar agent-tool protocols

• Experience building developer onboarding, activation funnels, or PLG infrastructure

• You've set up growth data infrastructure: PostHog, feature flags, funnel dashboards, behavioral cohorts

• Open-source contributions

• Experience at an early-stage startup, and you loved it

Notes:

• This is an in-person role located in our San Francisco (SOMA) office

Join The Movement

We're not just building a product - we're leading a movement to transform AI from just chatbots to agents that can take actions against real systems. This is your chance to be at the forefront of that revolution.

If you want to look back in 5 years and say, "I helped build that", then we want to talk to you. Ready to make AI actually useful? Apply Now

Compensation and Benefits

This role offers a competitive salary, equity, and benefits. Compensation is aligned with the range below and determined based on a candidate's background, experience, and performance.

Salary Range

$170,000-$260,000 USD