Senior Software Engineer, Product

About the role

Arena builds the platform that evaluates how AI models perform in the real world, founded by researchers from UC Berkeley's SkyLab to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use. The role is hands-on and end-to-end, owning features from technical scoping through deployment and post-launch iteration, ensuring solutions work beyond the code. You will design and extend schemas, APIs, and business logic to support new product capabilities while shipping high-quality product code across the entire stack. You will incorporate real user feedback from data, direct user contact, and product instincts to refine what you ship and collaborate closely with ML researchers to turn research services into production-ready consumables. The position requires working with design, product, and engineering to define what to build, not just how, while advocating for improvements to development, testing, and deployment practices.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own features from technical scoping through deployment and post-launch iteration, ensuring they work for users after launch.
• Design and extend schemas, APIs, and business logic to support new product capabilities as requirements evolve.
• Ship high-quality product code across the stack, moving from frontend interfaces to backend services and database layers.
• Incorporate real user feedback from data, direct user contact, and your own product instincts to iterate on shipped features.
• Collaborate with ML researchers to translate research services into production systems that are consumable for product development.
• Work closely with design, product, and engineering teams to determine what to build, aligning solutions with user needs and business goals.
• Identify and advocate for improvements to development, testing, and deployment practices to increase reliability and efficiency.
• Contribute to the evolution of our evaluation methodologies by connecting user behavior data to product decisions in the AI evaluation domain.
• Maintain a product engineering identity by caring whether the built solution functions well for real users in their workflows.
• Engage with our platform for evaluating how frontier systems handle real-world tasks, including agentic coding, creative generation, and professional productivity.
• Support the mission of making AI evaluation transparent, rigorous, and human-centered by building features that expose model behavior in actual use.
• Work on datasets and evaluations that decompose human experience to reveal what AI models do in real workflows beyond simple leaderboards.
• Help create a space where researchers, enterprises, and independent labs rely on our tools and open datasets to understand model behavior.
• Enable users across backgrounds to explore and shape the future of AI by building accessible and insightful evaluation tools.
• Iterate quickly while maintaining craftsmanship, balancing speed with thoughtful design to deliver durable product outcomes.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on product development across multiple phases of the product lifecycle.
• Experience building user-facing web applications that span frontend, backend/API, and database, with an understanding of the request lifecycle across these layers.
• Clear and concise communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions and distinguish your work from the team's contributions.
• Evidence of shipping and iterating on features, including describing the full arc of a feature: problem, solution, code, post-launch outcomes, and potential improvements.
• A product engineering identity that prioritizes whether the built solution works for users, not just whether the code is clean or tests pass.
• Genuine curiosity about AI evaluation and Arena's mission, demonstrated by having used the product and articulating why the domain matters.
• Comfort working in a fast-moving environment where ownership, scoping, and execution are driven by individual contributors.
• Willingness to collaborate across disciplines, translating research concepts into production systems that integrate with the broader product.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with our stack: NextJS, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, ShadCN, HonoJS, Postgres, Vitest.
• Experience with Supabase or Vercel's AI SDK to accelerate integration with AI services and data workflows.
• Prior experience shipping features without dedicated PM or design support, relying on user conversations and data to define direction.

Practical notes

• This role is full-time and based in the Bay Area.
• Arena offers competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where team members are based, with the base salary range depending on the candidate's permanent work location.
• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits include medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
• Arena provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.