About Arcade
Arcade is building the world’s first AI physical product creation platform, where imagination becomes reality. Our platform lets anyone design, purchase, and sell custom, manufacturable products using natural language and generative AI. We believe everyone should have the power to create physical goods as easily as they post online, and we’re building the infrastructure to make that real.
We’ve raised $42M from a world-class group of investors, including Reid Hoffman, Forerunner Ventures (Kirsten Green), Canaan Partners (Laura Chau), Adverb Ventures (April Underwood), Factorial Funds (Sol Bier), Offline Ventures (Brit Morin), Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), Inspired Capital (Alexa von Tobel), and Torch Capital (Jonathan Keidan). Our angel investors include Elad Gil, Ev Williams, Marissa Mayer, Sara Beykpour, Kayvon Beykpour, Anna Veronika Dorogush, Eugenia Kuyda, David Luan, Sharon Zhou, Kelly Wearstler, Karlie Kloss, Colin Kaepernick, Christy Turlington Burns, and Jeff Wilke.
Arcade is headquartered in San Francisco’s Presidio and led by serial entrepreneur Mariam Naficy (Minted, Eve), and a founding team with deep experience in generative AI, design systems, and supply chain. We’re pioneering a new category at the intersection of AI, personal expression, and on-demand manufacturing, and we’re building fast.
Role Summary
As a Research Engineer at Arcade, you will work on the frontier of generative AI, building the models, pipelines, and infrastructure that power real-time creativity. This role blends hands-on experimentation with deep systems thinking to bring new generative techniques from research to production.
You’ll train small, domain-specific models, prototype new workflows across LLMs and diffusion architectures, and ship them directly into features used by real users. You’ll collaborate closely with AI research, product, and engineering to develop novel capabilities and bring them to life in production. And you’ll be part of a small, high-agency team where people ship fast, own their ideas end-to-end, and help shape entirely new modes of interaction.
What You'll Do
- Train, fine-tune, and evaluate generative models across text, image, and multimodal inputs
- Develop model pipelines for domain-specific tasks, including LLM-based tools, text-to-image generation, and multi-agent workflows
- Design internal tools and infrastructure to prototype, benchmark, and iterate on models efficiently
- Run structured evaluations across prompts, retrieval methods, generation quality, and UX performance
- Work closely with engineering and product teams to integrate experimental models into production systems
- Monitor and improve deployed models in production, focusing on performance, stability, and user impact
- Stay up to date with advances in generative AI and apply the best ideas pragmatically in a high-velocity environment
We're Looking For Research Engineers Who
- Build with intent and rigor, and care about performance, structure, and design at every layer
- Have experience training and deploying generative models, especially LLMs or diffusion architectures
- Enjoy debugging prompts, fine-tuning weights, testing loss curves, and optimizing inference
- Move fluidly between rapid experimentation and shipping robust, user-facing features
- Thrive in high-agency environments with fast iteration cycles and high technical ownership
- Communicate clearly and work effectively across technical and cross-functional teams
What You Bring
- A background in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a similar field
- Must be available to start sometime between January and August 2026
- Strong Python experience and fluency with machine learning libraries such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Familiarity with model training and fine-tuning on domain-specific or custom datasets
- Experience with retrieval systems, prompt design, evaluation frameworks, or embedding workflows
- Understanding of model deployment and performance tuning in production environments
- Bonus: experience with multi-agent systems, generative UX design, or production LLM pipelines
Additional
Competitive compensation
Lunch provided daily
Company events
Arcade is an equal opportunity employer. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and supportive team, and to creating a platform where anyone, anywhere, can make something meaningful.
