About

AI systems are getting better on benchmarks, but still fail in real-world use.

At Arcada Labs, we build products used by millions of people around the world that give us direct access to real human preference and judgment. That lets us evaluate models on what people actually care about, not just what benchmarks happen to measure.

Our products have reached millions of users across 190+ countries and are already used by frontier labs. We’ve collaborated on announcing model releases with OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, and more.

Whoever defines the evaluations defines what models become good at. We create the evolutionary pressure that pushes models toward what people actually want.

We’re a small, deeply technical team with people from Harvard, Berkeley, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, backed by Index Ventures, YC, Conviction, SV Angel, BoxGroup and others.

The Role

Member of Technical Staff, Platform Engineer

You’ll design, build, and own distributed systems and core platform infrastructure end-to-end across the stack - from user-facing product surfaces and real-time interactions to evaluation pipelines, model orchestration, and the systems underneath them.

What You’ll Own

• User-facing product surfaces and UX for Design Arena and related products—building fast, reliable, and intuitive interfaces for real-world workflows

• Distributed systems that power real-time product experiences, user interactions, and large-scale data flows behind Design Arena and similar systems

• Evaluation pipelines that turn millions of pairwise preferences into reliable model signals

• Model and agent orchestration systems that run complex, multi-step workflows across products and evaluations

• Core platform infrastructure for deploying new product categories, multi-turn interactions, and reusable internal abstractions

• Production systems that are fast, reliable, and observable under real-world load

What We’re Looking For

• We don’t optimize for years of experience. We care about your ability to build, debug, and ship real systems - if you can prove that, we’re interested.

• Strong production engineering experience (full-stack; open to backend-heavy or frontend-heavy profiles). Our stack includes, but is not limited to, Python, TypeScript, React/Next.js, Swift, Android/Kotlin, and infrastructure across major cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud). You do not need to be an expert in all of them.

• Experience building or operating distributed systems at scale

• Comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and shipping reliably

• Experience with real-time or data-intensive systems is a plus

• Experience or strong familiarity with AI systems, agentic workflows, model development, or evaluation

We hire for strong engineering execution and mission alignment.

What to Expect

• High agency and ownership from day one

• Direct work with founders on core systems and decisions

• Fast iteration cycles and real production impact

• A small, focused team working on a hard, meaningful problem

This is a high-intensity, high-impact environment. We move quickly, operate with limited structure, and expect people to take ownership and deliver.