Founding Abuse Engineer

Arena

Founding Abuse Engineer at Arena Intelligence focusing on platform misuse detection and enforcement. Collaborating with cross-functional teams to build secure and trustworthy AI evaluation systems.

Posted 4/23/2026full-timeBay Area • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesMid-LevelSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

GoJavaScriptNode.jsPythonSQLTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the abuse vision for Arena: what gets detected, what gets enforced, how fast, and with what false-positive budget
Design and operate detection for bots, sybils, coordinated inauthentic voting, and rating-system manipulation — the integrity of Arena's leaderboards is the product
Build enforcement primitives (rate limits, challenges, shadowbans, account actions, model-side refusals) that are reversible, auditable, and humane
Detect and mitigate inference abuse and cost exploitation at the platform layer
Build jailbreak and multi-provider misuse detection across the models Arena serves, and partner with model-provider trust & safety teams on signal-sharing and escalation
Scope and implement abuse monitoring for every new product launch — web search, web fetch, live site deployment, and whatever's next — as part of the launch checklist, not after the fact
Prototype and mature into production systems of detection, review, and enforcement for the highest-severity harms (CSAM/NCII, violent extremism, self-harm), including the legal reporting pipeline (e.g., NCMEC)
Build internal investigator tooling so policy, on-call, and future T&S analysts can triage incidents without engineering bottleneck
Partner with Security on shared surface — account takeover, credential stuffing, API-key abuse, and the identity/behavioral-signal platform
Partner with policy, legal, and leadership on acceptable-use policy, enforcement escalations, and public-integrity narrative

Requirements

What you’ll need

6+ years of production software engineering experience, including building and operating systems under adversarial conditions
Shipped experience in at least one of: trust & safety, anti-abuse, anti-fraud, anti-spam, integrity, or risk engineering
Strong SQL and data-analysis skills — this role is 30%+ pattern-finding and investigation, not just shipping code
Adversarial and investigative mindset — you can articulate a novel attack before designing the defense, and follow evidence when a novel harm surfaces
High judgment on false-positive cost, user harm, and the reversibility of enforcement actions
Proficiency in a modern backend language (Node.js, TypeScript, Python, or Go)
Excellent communication — you'll build alignment with engineering, product, policy, and leadership routinely.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

SQLdata analysisNode.jsTypeScriptPythonGosystem designdetection systemsenforcement primitivesabuse monitoring

Soft Skills

adversarial mindsetinvestigative mindsethigh judgmentexcellent communicationalignment building