Senior Backend SRE — Go/Rust, API Gateways & Observability

Arena; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Cutting-edge AI work

Culture of transparency

Job summary

Arena Intelligence is seeking an experienced backend engineer to build the core infrastructure for its online evaluation systems. You will design low-latency APIs, scalable gateways, and the underlying services that route models from multiple providers.

As an early member of the infrastructure team, you'll work with researchers and product leaders to ship reliable, enterprise-grade software and observability tooling that scales with demand.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with distributed systems or developer-facing platforms.
• Proficiency in Go and/or Rust with experience building high-throughput APIs or gateways.
• Experience with LLM provider APIs and token/rate-limit challenges.
• Solid cloud skills with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and databases like Postgres/Redis.
• Product mindset focusing on API developer experience and delivering reliable infrastructure.
• Comfort with ambiguity in a startup environment and willingness to wear many hats.

Responsibilities

• Build and orchestrate API-based products from the ground up with low-latency, high-reliability APIs.
• Ship enterprise-grade infrastructure including rate limiting, auth, usage metering, and SOC 2 readiness.
• Develop deep observability with traces, latency breakdowns, token usage, and real-time dashboards.
• Integrate with Arena's evaluation platform and collaborate with researchers to turn ideas into products.

Skills

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

APIs

Cloud (AWS/GCP)

Observability

Tools

Postgres

Redis

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Job description

Arena Intelligence is seeking an experienced backend engineer to build the core infrastructure for its online evaluation systems. You will design low-latency APIs, scalable gateways, and the underlying services that route models from multiple providers.

As an early member of the infrastructure team, you'll work with researchers and product leaders to ship reliable, enterprise-grade software and observability tooling that scales with demand.