Director of Core Platform Engineering

About the role

We are 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 are looking for a Director of Core Platform Engineering to own Arcade’s mission-critical commerce and operations infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• 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: Infrastructure that makes image generation jobs reliable, cost-efficient, and production-grade — think batching, parallelization, auto-scaling, and observability.
• Client SDK and MCP: Integration layer that allows developers to build applications on top of Arcade — think product creation, order lifecycle management, authentication, and billing.

Requirements

• 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.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. The product is moving fast. You’ll make architectural decisions before every requirement is clean — and you’ll make good ones.

Qualifications

• 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.

Skills

• 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.

Benefits

• 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.

Pay

• Top-of-market base salary plus meaningful early-stage equity — a level of ownership you cannot get at a large company.

Schedule

• Full-time.

Company

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.