Member of Technical Staff - Platform Engineer

About Arca

Arca is a wealth management firm built from the ground up with AI. Most people get financial advice that's reactive: an annual check-in, a plan that's a document instead of a living thing, a relationship where you're one of three hundred clients your advisor is trying to remember. We think that's backwards. The kind of service that used to require a team of specialists behind you, the kind that makes you feel like the only person in the room, should be available to far more than the ultra-wealthy.

So we're building it. We're not SaaS — we are the wealth management business, rebuilding it from the inside with AI. Our platform is an Iron Man suit for advisors: it takes over the low-leverage work so they can focus on what actually requires a human, showing up with empathy, context, and judgment. Underneath, it keeps a living understanding of each client. It remembers the thing you mentioned once, six months ago. It notices when your life changes — a new job, a new kid, a market shift — and adjusts before you think to ask. You won't see the technology. You'll just notice your advisor seems to know you better than any financial professional ever has.

That's the product we're growing: client by client, on the strength of the experience itself. We started by acquiring firms managing over $1B in client assets, which gave us real advisors, real clients, and real financial outcomes to build against from day one. But acquisition was the starting line. The bet is that an advisor backed by this platform delivers something good enough that clients come to us on their own.

It's a $20T market, and we think it's ready to be rebuilt.

— Rron, CEO

The receipts

• Stage: Series A, $64M raised

• Backed by: General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Venrock

• Board & Advisors: Former CEO of Vanguard, Former CFO of Schwab, Founder of Altruist, Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money)

The team

We’re small on purpose and engineering heavy: about 80% of the team is technical. We’re based in NYC and hail from high growth startups like Stripe, Ramp, Rippling, Plaid, Doordash, & Glean.

We’re fully in-office in Flatiron, five days a week—lunch together, coffee breaks, basketball games, happy hours.

The role

As a Member of Technical Staff focused on Platform, you'll own the foundation everything else runs on. The infrastructure, backend systems, and developer experience that let a small engineering team ship agents into a regulated, high-stakes domain without slowing down. One framing we keep coming back to: agents are the primary users of our system of record, and they operate at scale, across every client, all the time. That puts unusual demands on the platform underneath — reliability, cost, and performance aren't afterthoughts, they're the product. If you build it, you own it.

What you'll build (and own)

• Core infrastructure and backend systems. The services, data stores, and APIs that everything else is built on—designed for a workload where non-human agents are the heaviest, most constant users. This is what lets the rest of the team move fast without the ground shifting under them.

• Safe execution for agents. The sandbox where agents write and run code and take real actions, plus the controls that let them reach our backend and databases without doing damage—versioned SDKs, scoped permissions, rate limits, isolation.

• Developer experience and internal efficiency. The build, test, deploy, and observability tooling that determines how fast a small engineering team can ship. In a team this small, the leverage of good internal tooling is enormous: every hour you save the team compounds across every acquisition we take on.

• Performance and cost. The systems that keep agents fast and correct under real load, and keep our infrastructure spend sane as we scale across four or five acquisitions this year. An agent that's slow, flaky, or ruinously expensive to run isn't shippable.

Example problems you'd work on

These aren't hypothetical; we're actively working on versions of all of these.

• A sandbox where agents can safely write and run code. Our agents don't just call APIs—they write and execute code and take real actions. You'll build the sandbox that makes this safe: how we deploy it, how we version the SDKs agents write against, and how we give agents access to our backend and databases without letting them do damage—rate limits, scoped permissions, isolation. Get this right and agents can do far more, far more safely.

• Cloud agents that triage and fix bugs. With a small engineering team shipping into a high-stakes domain, engineering time is our scarcest resource. You'll build agents that live in our infrastructure—triaging incoming bugs, reproducing them, localizing the cause, and proposing or landing fixes—so the team spends its time on problems that actually need a human. Internal leverage that compounds across every acquisition.

• Powering the M&A acquisition engine. Growth runs through acquiring RIA firms, and every one arrives with its own stack—a CRM last updated in 2011, a proprietary custodian export, IT systems held together by a decade of habit. You'll build the infrastructure that onboards a new firm and its existing systems onto our platform fast, without a bespoke project every time. The faster and cleaner this gets, the faster we grow.

• Querying years of portfolio data at agent speed. Agents need to reason over years of portfolio performance history, and they need it instantly—without hammering the systems that keep the product running. You'll build the read paths, stores, and deep integrations with custodians and performance-reporting providers that let agents query deep history quickly while keeping our backend systems isolated and healthy.

• Maturing our backend. The platform is live and proven; now it has to scale across four or five acquisitions this year. You'll level up the foundation—data warehouses, pipelines, and the core systems everything runs on—so it holds up as data volume and agent load grow.

The kind of person who thrives here

You’re excited by ownership, ambiguity, and building things that matter.

• You think in systems and take ownership of the whole stack. You're happiest when you understand how something works end to end, and you instinctively leave infrastructure better instrumented and better understood than you found it. You know "tech debt vs. shipping" is a false tradeoff here—the platform is the thing that lets everyone else ship, so its health is a feature, not a chore.

• You're ambitious in a way specific to this work. You're building for people who manage real retirement savings and estate plans. "Good enough" means something different here. You'll rebuild something that works because you know it won't hold through the next acquisition—and that standard motivates you more than shipping faster than last sprint.

• You move fast, and you know speed and reliability aren't in tension here. Advisors depend on what you build every day. Breaking prod isn't something you wait until Monday to fix.

• You're someone people actually want to be in the room with. This is a small, tight-knit team in one office, five days a week, working on problems that don't have clean answers. The people who thrive here want to argue about architecture at lunch and then build something together in the afternoon. Kind, direct, and low-ego, you can give candid feedback without being an asshole, and you're genuinely energized by this environment (not just tolerant of it).

Why now is the moment to join

This is a narrow window with unusually high leverage.

• We just came out of stealth, and we're growing fast. The team is intentionally small, the equity reflects that, and the ceiling is high. You'd be joining early enough that the work you do now directly shapes what the company becomes and what's possible next.

• The advisor-facing product is being defined right now, by a small team that talks to advisors every day. We've just brought on our second firm—the real inflection point, where we start separating what generalizes from what was bespoke. The patterns you set become the foundation for every acquisition that follows.

• The consumer product is a blank page. We've never built directly for consumers until now—no legacy, no template. Whoever takes this on defines what the experience even is.

• The hard part is behind us, which means the interesting part is starting. The platform is live, the concept is proven, advisors have moved real client assets onto it. The work now is scaling a working system across four or five acquisitions this year—workflows, data, agents, reliability under real load.