Software Engineer Intern, Backend

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

Note: we are open to fall, winter, and spring internships.

As a Software Engineer at Arcade, you will work across our backend and AI systems to power the real-time, intelligent workflows that bring generative creation to life. You will own critical infrastructure, from model orchestration to caching layers to inference pipelines, and partner closely with AI research, product, and design to launch entirely new user experiences.

This role is for systems-minded builders who care about performance, reliability, and clarity. You will move quickly, work collaboratively, and ship ambitious products that define new creative possibilities. You’ll be joining a fast-moving, highly technical team where engineers ship bold ideas quickly and own them end-to-end.

What You'll Do

• Design and build scalable backend systems for model execution, prompt orchestration, agentic workflows, and real-time inference

• Own infrastructure for core user actions, including API design, job queues, caching, observability, and deployment

• Collaborate across AI research, product, and design to bring new capabilities into production

• Build core primitives for text-to-product creation, such as model pipelines, tool integrations, retrieval flows, and evaluation frameworks

• Continuously improve performance, latency, and stability across inference-heavy systems

• Contribute to a high-trust, high-velocity engineering culture

We're Looking for Engineers Who

• Have strong backend and infrastructure foundations and enjoy building fast, reliable systems

• Have experience owning production systems that interact with real users or real-world data

• Are excited about generative AI and have worked with LLMs, agent frameworks, vector search, or multimodal tools

• Move quickly from prototype to production and thrive in high-agency environments

• Care about product quality and user experience, even when working deep in the stack

• Bring energy, taste, and humility to everything they do

What You Bring

• Currently in school with a background in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a similar field

• Experience building and scaling backend systems in production

• Proficiency with Python and backend frameworks such as Django or FastAPI

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure tools like GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, and Pub/Sub

• Hands-on experience with LLM pipelines, model orchestration, or prompt tooling in production or personal projects

• Strong debugging, performance tuning, and system design skills

• Bonus: experience at early-stage startups, with generative AI products, or in creative tooling

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.