Senior Staff Software Engineer, Content Intelligence

Arc XP; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Arc XP is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our AI-powered platform. You will define how systems fit together, write designs for others to implement, and ship the hardest parts at scale across tenants and languages.

You will own platform architecture, guide security and privacy, manage production releases, and mentor engineers while shaping the product roadmap in a fast-moving, high-impact environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, building, and operating backend distributed systems at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction at senior levels.

Responsibilities

• Define end-to-end platform architecture for Arc's AI system.
• Lead major architectural changes end to end, including security reviews and staged rollout.
• Own the release train from staging to production across regions and handle on-call rotation.

Skills

Backend distributed systems design

Job description

Job Description

Arc XP is the AI-powered content platform for media companies. Purpose-built for publishers and broadcasters, it is the CMS and content platform that ambitious media organizations across digital media, news publishing, broadcast, and B2B publishing use to create and distribute content, grow and engage their audiences, and monetize through subscriptions and advertising. Fully leveraging AWS, the platform is built on a microservices architecture, and our teams deploy new features and products daily. Arc XP currently powers more than 1,500 sites in 25 countries that reach more than 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly.

This position sits on the Content Intelligence team, which builds and operates the AI systems that power Arc XP. The team owns the Arc Intelligence API, a multi-tenant LLM and vector platform used across Arc products; Ask the News, which provides retrieval-augmented answers over a publisher's own archive; and the intelligence layer behind our personalization and audience products.

These are production systems serving publishers across North America, Europe, Latin America, and APAC. They support a wide range of newsroom, audience, and business workflows, and that breadth shapes how we build: with strong tenant isolation, reliable retrieval, thoughtful controls, and careful attention to cost, performance, and trust at scale.

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead technical direction across these systems. This is a senior individual contributor role with organizational technical leadership scope. You will define how these systems fit together, write the designs others build against, ship the hardest parts, and ensure the work scales across tenants, content models, languages, and operating requirements.

What Motivates You

• You're motivated by powering journalism that millions of readers around the world rely on.
• You develop clear, evidence-informed perspectives on quality and outcomes, and explain the reasoning behind them constructively.
• You believe a feature isn't finished when it works, but when it is instrumented, observable, and documented well enough for someone else to pick up.
• You don't wait for direction. You bring ideas forward, flag issues that deserve attention, and give leadership the input they need to make good decisions.
• You have a bias for elegance, choosing simplification and consolidation over adding more layers of configuration and logic.
• You thrive in fast-moving environments with many moving parts, shifting focus between priorities as the day unfolds.

How You'll Support The Mission

Platform Architecture

• Own the end-to-end design of Arc's AI platform: model routing, prompt management, vector storage, and agentic runtimes.
• Lead major architectural changes end to end, including solution design, security review, incremental rollout, and deprecation of what it replaced.
• Set technical direction that holds across the organization, keeping decisions coherent with the services we depend on.

AI Quality and Evaluation

• Own and evolve the evaluation infrastructure, keeping shared metrics reliable, relevant, and aligned with evolving quality needs.
• Lead the safe adoption of new models through staged rollout practices, quality checks, and clear recovery paths.
• Define and maintain AI guardrails that protect users, tenants, and platform reliability while keeping model capabilities aligned with product needs.

Multi-Tenancy, Security, and Privacy

• Own the multi-tenancy model and enforce tenant isolation in all new development.
• Partner with Security to strengthen privacy-by-default practices, with clear standards for data retention, minimization, erasure, and compliance controls.
• Partner with Security on threat modeling, secure design reviews, and prioritizing vulnerability remediation.

Production Ownership and Delivery

• Own the release train from customer test environments to production across regions, hotfixes included, without needing someone else to decide when it is safe to ship.
• Participate in the on-call rotation.
• Define and track key metrics for system health, customer activity, and business-critical workflows.
• Partner with operations and customer enablement to streamline customer setup and onboarding.

Technical Leadership and Product Ownership

• Drive what gets built. Bring ideas forward, shape the roadmap for your product area, and advocate for priorities with product and engineering leadership.
• Lead mob programming sessions, design reviews, and architecture discussions, using them to raise engineering standards rather than simply approving changes.
• Mentor and unblock other engineers through hands-on collaboration and design partnership.

Minimum Qualifications

The Skills and Experience You Bring

• 8+ years designing, building, and operating backend distributed systems at scale, including significant experience setting technical direction at the senior, staff, or principal level. Demonstrated abil