Staff Software Engineer, AI & Platform

About Arketa Arketa 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 Role We'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 hybrid 3x a week to our NYC office in NoHo. 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 We believe in setting our team up to thrive. First 30 days Ship to production in your first week and keep shipping Build working context on our stack, the migrations in flight, and where our biggest reliability gaps are Land one self-contained win that makes the team measurably faster First 90 days You've altered the way our engineers work, in a positive way, and introduced AI-powered capability the team didn't have before A meaningful piece o