Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own entire product areas at Arena — identifying what to build, designing and shipping the solution, driving it to measurable outcomes, and raising the bar for the team along the way. This is a hands-on IC role. You are the architect, not the delegator. You write code, design systems, and ship product — and you have a track record of doing this repeatedly with clear, attributable impact.
You’ll
- Own product areas end-to-end — from identifying opportunities that aren't on anyone's roadmap, to building conviction, shipping, and driving to measurable outcomes
- Design complete systems: data model, API design, frontend architecture (full-stack) or backend services and infrastructure (backend), and deployment strategy
- Make high-stakes technical decisions under uncertainty — build-vs-buy, monolith-vs-service, when to prototype and when to harden — and be accountable for the outcomes
- Work with ML researchers to turn research services into reliable, product-consumable systems
- Ship and iterate — you don't hand off after v1. You measure, course-correct, and drive to sustained impact
- Raise the technical and product quality bar on the team — introduce practices others adopt, unblock teammates, and create clarity out of ambiguity
- Navigate cross-functional collaboration with product, design, research, and leadership to align on what matters
You’ll have
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on product development
- Deep experience building web applications spanning data model, API, frontend architecture, and deployment. You can design complete systems end-to-end and explain why you rejected alternatives at each decision point. You can explain how your architecture decisions shaped the product's capabilities and measurably improved product quality or team velocity.
- A track record of repeated, attributable impact — multiple projects across different roles or companies where you can quantify outcomes (revenue, engagement, efficiency) and the impact sustained after you moved on
- Personal technical depth, not delegation — you are the architect. You've dealt with real performance issues: slow queries, N+1 problems, caching, transaction isolation. You can go three levels deep on any decision and get more specific, not vaguer.
- Product judgment and autonomous ownership — you've identified opportunities, validated them with evidence, built buy-in, shipped, and the bet paid off. You know when to prototype, harden, or kill work.
- Clear, persuasive communication — you build buy-in across engineering, product, and leadership. You create clarity for others, not just yourself.
- Genuine conviction about AI evaluation and Arena's mission — you can articulate why this domain matters and where the product should go
Bonus Points
- Production experience with AI/LLM systems — inference pipelines, evaluation workflows, model integration, or AI-powered product features
- Familiarity with our stack: NextJS, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, ShadCN, HonoJS, Postgres, Vitest
- Experience with Supabase or Vercel's AI SDK
- You've raised the bar on a team with measurable before/after — introduced practices, tools, or standards that others adopted
Our Tech Stack
- NextJS
- React + TypeScript
- Tailwind + ShadCN
- HonoJS
- Postgres
- Vitest
