Engineering Manager - Runtime and Platform

Garuda Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 179,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

Garuda Ventures is seeking an engineering leader to scale a high-impact AI platform. You’ll manage a 6+ senior engineers, own technical direction, and align with product & founders to deliver enterprise-grade tools built in Go, Typescript, and Python.

In a fast-paced, on-prem and SaaS environment, you’ll drive reliability, security, and scale while mentoring engineers and shaping the team’s growth. This is a hands-on leadership role at a pioneering startup with competitive equity.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with 2+ years in leadership.
• Experience deploying SaaS and on-prem software.
• Strong architectural instincts with business alignment.
• Excellent cross-functional communication.

Responsibilities

• Be responsible for deliverables, reliability, and uptime of the team.
• Define product vision and architecture in partnership with Product and founders.
• Hire and mentor engineers; manage a 6-person senior team.
• Define and deliver next platform features for customers.
• Ship high-impact features at scale with security and enterprise readiness.
• Automate week-long tasks into shorter processes to empower agents.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Team management

SaaS deployment

Go/TypeScript

Architectural design

Cross-functional leadership

LLMs/AI in SDLC

Communication

Job description

Everyone's building AI agents, but almost nobody gets them to production.

Building an impressive demo is easy. Building an AI agent that can securely take action inside enterprise systems is hard. The moment an agent accesses customer data, executes a workflow, or makes changes on behalf of a user, authorization, governance, and trust become the real engineering challenge.

Arcade is the MCP runtime that gives agents the power to do both seamlessly. We connect agents to the systems they act in, then give each one a permission slip and a paper trail - proof of what it's allowed to do, and a record of what it did. That's what makes AI safe to turn loose: real actions, on real systems, already shipping inside Fortune 100 companies.

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

• Traction: Real deployments with Fortune-100 customers like Morgan Stanley and Open Table
• 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: Every enterprise is racing to put agents in production - almost none get there. The problem isn't better models, it's proving which agent can take which action, on behalf of which user, against which system. 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 Series A round is led by SYN Ventures, with strategic investment from Morgan Stanley and Wipro. Our earlier investors have also backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see - this is going to be huge.

The Challenge

Team Charter: Build, maintain, and deploy the runtime that customers will use to run, manage, secure, and understand AI tools and abilities.

Hot off the heels of our series A raise, Arcade’s engineering team is growing! You will be one of our first two engineering managers, responsible for scaling the team owning the development of our platform and services. This is a team of distributed systems engineers and authorization/identity experts who build our platform and features like MCP gateways, muti-tenant features, roles and permissions, and the platform-as-service for tool executions that powers arcade-deploy. Given our enterprise-leaning customer base, this team also invests in security and compliance, as well as the integrations our self-hosted customers need. Building the one-stop platform for the enterprise to run and manage all of their AI tools safely and easily is the mission.

We expect that you’ll spend most of your time leveling-up the team, ensuring the team is unblocked, and aligning the team’s work with our product organization… but you still are excited to get your hands dirty in the code when possible. While this is primarily a people, product, and operations leadership role, we expect you to stay technically engaged through reviews, critical-path contributions, and occasional hands-on coding when it meaningfully unblocks the team. We have a team of A-players today, and we need you to scale up our capacity without losing our culture, our heart, or our velocity.

This role involves navigating ambiguity, evolving standards in the AI tools ecosystem (e.g. drafting changes to MCP specification, which we contribute to), and the challenges of scaling fast without sacrificing quality at an early startup. This team works primarily in Go, Typescript, and Python, and makes heavy use of AI development tools & processes. This role reports to the Head of Engineering.

The ideal candidate for this has built on-prem delivered products before and is comfortable with large-scale SaaS deployments. You are invested in the AI revolution and have strong opinions on what it means to roll out safe AI products at scale.

What You'll Do

• Be ultimately responsible for the deliverables, stability, and uptime of your team, and empowered to grow and modify these goals as the business matures.
• Ensure a consistent product vision and architecture for the team, and help shape the team & company roadmap - you will be the primary owner of technical direction, prioritization, and execution for the team’s work, in close partnership with Product and the founders.
• Hire and Mentor talented engineers and help shape their technical and career growth. You’ll be managing a team of 6 very senior engineers, many of whom have been startup CTOs themselves, with the goal of growing (and then splitting) your team by the end of the year.
• Define and deliver the next most important platform features for our customers.
• Ship high-impact features at scale while ensuring reliability, security, and enterprise readiness.
• Build leverage into the system - Transform week-long tasks into minutes through automation and agents.

Required Skills

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in engineering leadership.
• Proven success managing and scaling high-performing teams.
• Deep experience deploying and monitoring software both as a SaaS platform and on-prem.
• Strong architectural instincts and ability to align technical direction with business outcomes.
• Passion for building frameworks that empower other developers to win.
• Excellent communication skills and cross-functional leadership.
• A desire to use LLMs/AI throughout all parts of the software development lifecycle, and to teach folks how to do that well.
• An insatiable desire to ship and continuously improve.

Bonus Points

• Open-source contributions
• You’ve been at an early-stage startup before and loved it
• Go and/or Typescript expertise

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.

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

$179,000-$285,000 USD