Staff Software Engineer, AI & Platform

arketa; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Ownership and Advancement

Stock options

Unlimited PTO

Medical/dental/vision insurance

Fitness class reimbursement

Parental leave policy

Job summary

Arketa is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build AI products that empower fitness studios, reduce operational workload, and help them grow. You’ll modernize core architecture, develop agentic loops, CI, and observability while mentoring engineers in a fast-moving, autonomous team.

The role is remote based in the United States, with a focus on delivering customer-facing AI capabilities and scalable platform improvements for small business owners.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience (emphasis on evidence over years).
• Full-stack contributor; expects cross-stack collaboration.
• Fluent in JS/TS, AI tooling in daily work, and building agentic workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build AI products that automate studio operations and improve the product.
• Develop agentic loops to enhance codebase and internal systems.
• Shape how AI models are used as they improve.
• Simplify infrastructure to speed up both human and agent engineers.
• Improve operational rigor with automated safety nets in production.
• Work across the stack (TypeScript, Node, NestJS, React, Postgres) to ship features daily.
• Mentor mid and junior engineers and set patterns for the team.
• Take accountability for team delivery and outcomes.

Skills

JS/TS

Full-stack

AI tooling

Observability

Mentorship

Migration leadership

Product judgment

Autonomy

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

NestJS

React

Postgres

Job description

About ArketaArketa is building the operating system for modern fitness and wellness. Our mission is to make wellness more accessible by empowering studios and wellness entrepreneurs to grow beyond in-person classes. We provide a powerful, all-in-one platform to manage and scale hybrid wellness businesses, whether online, in-person, or both.With Arketa, studios can manage schedules, accept bookings and payments, build on-demand video libraries, host retreats, run automated marketing, and launch fully branded apps and websites. We make it simple for founders to deliver a seamless, professional experience across every customer touchpoint. We've raised $15M in Series A funding and are growing quickly. It's a unique moment to join us. We're building a category-defining company in a fast-moving space, and we're looking for a leader who is excited to help shape what world-class partner support looks like in the wellness category.

About the RoleWe're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to build AI products our customers can feel, and to make the team around you faster while you do it. Your first big surface is a customer-facing AI product that takes meaningful operational work off a studio owner's plate and helps them grow. Alongside that, you'll help modernize core parts of our architecture, and build the agentic loops, CI, and observability that let a small team ship at a fast pace. This is a product engineering role first. Internal tooling and developer experience are how you multiply the team, not the destination. Our customers are small business owners whose livelihoods depend on what you ship, so the feedback loop is short and the stakes are real. This is a permanent individual contributor role. There is no management track, by design. This role is remote based out of the U.S.

About the team:You'll join a small, senior, fully distributed engineering team. We operate with high autonomy and very little process: a customer asks for something Monday, it's built Tuesday, shipped Wednesday, and we're reading their feedback by Friday. You can form a hypothesis, ship a small experiment, measure it, and iterate without waiting for permission. We're an outlier in our industry in how aggressively we use AI tooling, and this role sets the pattern for everyone else. You'll partner directly with our engineering leaders on technical direction, and you'll mentor mid and junior engineers who will look to you for how the work gets done. We've grown roughly over the past two years and we're financially disciplined, maintaining lots of runway. That means you get startup speed without startup precarity.

What You'll Do:

• Build AI products that let studio operators automate their operations so they can focus on the parts of their business they're most passionate about
• Build agentic loops that improve the product, our codebase, our internal systems, and our ability to deliver for customers
• Position us to get the most out of AI models as they continue to improve
• Simplify our infrastructure and operations to make both our human and agent engineers faster
• Improve our operational rigor and automated safety nets: detecting, alerting on, and responding to issues in production
• Work across the stack (TypeScript, Node, NestJS, React, Postgres) to ship features and improvements daily
• Mentor mid and junior engineers, and partner with engineering leadership to establish patterns the whole team adopts
• Be accountable not just for your own output, but for how you help the team deliver more

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 daysShip to production in your first week and keep shippingBuild working context on our stack, the migrations in flight, and where our biggest reliability gaps areLand one self-contained win that makes the team measurably faster
• First 90 daysYou've altered the way our engineers work, in a positive way, and introduced AI-powered capability the team didn't have beforeA meaningful piece of customer-facing AI functionality is in front of real studios
• First 6 monthsYou're seen as a model staff engineer here, and other engineers name you as a source they learn fromThe patterns, safety nets, and tooling you've built are load-bearing for how the team ships

What we're looking for:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience in most cases, though we care more about evidence than years
• Full-stack contributor. Deep expertise somewhere is great, but everyone here contributes across the stack. If you only want to work in one layer, this isn't the role
• A JavaScript and TypeScript background. You can come from an adjacent ecosystem, but you should be fluent and happy in JS/TSAI-native. You actively use AI tooling in your daily work and you build agentic workflows, evals, and automation into how your team operates. Not just coding assistants
• Scope of impact beyond a single team. You've influenced how engineering works at an org of roughly 20+ engineers, not just shipped well within your own squad
• A track record of leading successful migrations
• Experience designing systems for reliability: observability, alerting, incident response
• A history of influencing beyond your own work, including setting technical direction, establishing patterns others adopt, and raising the bar through code review, pairing, and mentorship
• Strong product judgment: you can take an ambiguous customer problem, scope it pragmatically, and ship in small increments
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and low process, creating the right amount of structure rather than waiting for it
• Bonus: You care about wellness and fitness personally
• You’ve built for entrepreneurs or small business owners before, or perhaps you’ve been one yourself
• You’ve spent time both within a larger, established engineering org and within a high-growth startup

What We Offer:

• Ownership and Opportunity for Advancement
• Competitive Salary and Stock Options
• Unlimited PTO: our policy is designed to give you the flexibility to rest, recharge, and take care of personal needs — while staying aligned with your team and responsibilities.
• Medical, dental and vision health insurance
• Fitness Class Reimbursement: we’re committed to supporting both employee wellness and our industry relationships. As an Arketa employee we see movement as opportunity.
• Parental Leave Policy

For this role, the estimated annual base salary is up to $180,000- $220,000, depending on experience and qualifications. In addition to base pay, we offer equity. We believe in compensating fairly and transparently, and we’re happy to provide more detail during the interview process.