Founding Engineer

Arcafeed (Acq. by Whop); Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 135,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

On-site Palo Alto

Job summary

ArcaLabs in Palo Alto is hiring founding engineers to build the platform underneath: the agent, its sandboxes, audit and eval systems, and the surfaces bankers will use daily. You’ll own end-to-end features across core systems, AI engineering, and frontend work.

You’ll ship code that runs inside the world's largest banks and PE firms. It’s a small team, so your contributions are visible from day one.

Qualifications

• Have >= 1 year of software engineering experience with a strong track record shipping production systems.
• Are fluent in Python and TypeScript; have shipped agent-driven features.
• Care about the quality of the deliverable, not just the code; you'd rather ship a working comps file than a beautiful abstraction.
• Have worked on evals, agent architecture, ML, data, and systems, and are excited to put them into a system bankers actually use.

Responsibilities

• Build and own components of our agent runtime including retrieval, memory, evals, and core AI work.
• Build infrastructure for agents: sandboxes, VMs, lifecycle, security, observability, data pipelines.
• Develop evals and observability for agents to ship better results faster.
• Ensure platform deployable in customer VPCs with single-tenant, KMS, audit logs.
• Collaborate with FDEs and sales to harden patterns into reusable platform features.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Production systems

Tools

Terraform

AWS

Docker

Job description

About The Team

ArcaLabs builds AI agents that perform sell-side tasks (public comps, IC memos, pitchbook strip profiles, earnings comp analysis) end-to-end. We're partnered with some of the largest financial data providers, including FactSet and CapIQ. Our founding team previously built Arcafeed, a SaaS tool for buy-side analysts, which was acquired in late 2025.

About The Team

ArcaLabs builds AI agents that perform sell-side tasks (public comps, IC memos, pitchbook strip profiles, earnings comp analysis) end-to-end. We're partnered with some of the largest financial data providers, including FactSet and CapIQ. Our founding team previously built Arcafeed, a SaaS tool for buy-side analysts, which was acquired in late 2025.

About The Role

We're hiring founding engineers to build the platform underneath ArcaLabs: the agent, the sandboxes they run in, the audit and eval systems, and the surfaces that investment bankers will live and work in. The work is half core systems, half AI engineering, half frontend, and entirely owned end-to-end.

You'll ship code that runs inside the world's largest banks and PE firms. We're a small team, so your work will be visible the day you commit it.

Some of the work you'll do

• Build and own components of our agent runtime including retrieval, memory, evals, and potentially more core AI work with finetuning and RL.


• Build infrastructure for our agents and agentic workflows: sandboxes, VMs, lifecycle management, security, observability, data pipelines, and more.


• Work on evals and observability for our agents and agentic workflows, so that we can ship better agents faster.


• Make the platform deployable in customer VPCs with single-tenant, KMS-keyed, audit-logged isolation, so that we can get inside customer networks without lighting hair on fire.


• Act as a foundation for our Forward Deployed Engineers and sales teams to harden the patterns that show up across multiple customers into shared platform features.

You might be a fit if you

• Have >= 1 year of software engineering experience with a strong track record shipping production systems.


• Are fluent in Python and TypeScript; have shipped agent-driven features.


• Care about the quality of the deliverable, not just the quality of the code; you'd rather ship a working comps file than a beautiful abstraction.


• Have worked on evals, agent architecture, ML, data, and systems, and are excited to put them into a system bankers actually use.

Bonus points

• Prior experience in fintech, capital markets, or financial data infrastructure.


• Prior experience building with systems languages like Go or Rust.


• Experience deploying enterprise SaaS into financial institutions (SOC 2, single tenant, customer-managed keys) with Terraform + AWS (RDS, S3, VPC). Terraform manages our data plane; services deploy from Dockerfiles and agent sandboxes are E2B templates defined in TypeScript.

Compensation

$135K – $250K + meaningful equity. Our team is based in Palo Alto, and this role is full-time, on-site.

About ArcaLabs

ArcaLabs is the official FactSet AI Partner, building AI agents that run sell-side workflows for investment banks and PE funds. We're the team behind Arcafeed (acquired) and we're hiring the founding squad in Palo Alto. We believe AI will widen, not narrow, the set of people who can do high-end finance work. We want to ship that future.

Equal opportunity

ArcaLabs is an equal opportunity employer. We hire based on merit, and we accommodate applicants with disabilities. If you need accommodation during the hiring process, email [e-mail].

Work authorization

ArcaLabs does not sponsor employment visas or green cards, including new H-1B petitions and H-1B transfers. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future employer sponsorship.