Infrastructure Engineer – TL

Arena

Infrastructure Engineer building core infrastructure for AI evaluations with scalable systems. Collaborating with engineers and researchers at Arena Intelligence.

Posted 7/20/2026full-timeBay Area • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesMid-LevelSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building high-reliability APIs and enterprise-grade infrastructure, with a strong focus on developer experience and cloud technologies. Proficient in distributed systems and capable of navigating ambiguity in a startup environment.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Backend Engineering ExperienceProficiency in Go and/or RustCloud Infrastructure SkillsExperience with LLM Provider APIsDistributed Systems Knowledge

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

API DevelopmentDistributed SystemsHigh-Throughput APIsStreaming Response HandlingRate LimitingAuthenticationUsage MeteringAudit LoggingToken ManagementCost Attribution

Soft Skills

Product-Oriented MindsetComfort with Ambiguity

Tools & Technologies

AWSGCPKubernetesTerraformPostgresRedis

Industry Keywords

SOC 2 ComplianceReal-Time DashboardsDistributed TracingLatency Breakdowns

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsGoGoogle Cloud PlatformKubernetesPostgresRedisRustTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build API-based products from the ground up. Design and implement low-latency, high-reliability APIs for leaderboards, models, and arenas.
Solve hard streaming problems. Handle SSE/streaming responses across heterogeneous providers, including partial failure recovery, mid-stream fallback, and consistent response normalization.
Ship enterprise-grade infrastructure. Build the systems enterprise customers expect: rate limiting, authentication, usage metering, cost attribution, audit logging, and SOC 2 compliance.
Build deep observability. Instrument infrastructure with distributed tracing, latency breakdowns, token-level usage tracking, and real-time dashboards so customers (and we) can see exactly what's happening.
Build AI-centered products. Integrate with our core evaluation platform, Arena data, and customer-specific benchmarks. Collaborate with the research team to turn novel ideas into full-featured products.
Flex across the stack. Contribute to the backend of our Leaderboards and Evals platforms when needed, helping unify our public and private data architectures.

Requirements

What you’ll need

4+ years of backend engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on distributed systems, infrastructure, or developer-facing platforms.
Strong proficiency in Go and/or Rust, with hands-on experience building high-throughput APIs or proxy/gateway systems.
Experience with LLM provider APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.) and a working understanding of the challenges: streaming, token management, rate limits, model-specific quirks.
Solid cloud infrastructure skills — you're comfortable with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and database systems like Postgres and Redis.
A product-oriented mindset. You think about the developer experience of your APIs, not just the implementation. You ask "why" before "how."
Comfort with ambiguity. We're a startup. Scope is fluid, context shifts, and you'll wear many hats. That should sound exciting, not stressful.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team.
Culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact.