What was your journey to Arena?

My journey to Arena is unusual, but likely rhymes with a lot of the design engineers that I meet. I started my career in advertising, where I co-founded and built a small, award-winning agency in New York City. We built interactive microsites and physical experiences for Fortune 50 brands where the focus was on cool design and visuals, and quirky and interesting interactions that had some difficult technology bent. I then shifted to the Big Agency world as a Creative Director, working in a similar capacity. I loved the experience, and loved coming up with and selling campaign ideas to the C-Suite, but missed being hands-on. I then moved to the Concept Lab at Amazon Shopping where I got to do both things, before hearing about Arena from our (now) recruiting team, and here I am 2 years later!

What is your current role at Arena? 

My title is Design Engineer, which means a lot of things to a lot of startups these days but, at Arena, it means getting hands-on with product development. Some days I spend all day in Figma, and other days are spent in my Code Editor. The work varies, and during my time at Arena, I’ve done everything from producing growth-engineering-minded prototypes and videos, to designing new modules, to coding new features in production.

Why did you join Arena?

Having grown up in advertising production, I’ve always found a huge emphasis on making high-craft experiences. This is similar at Arena, and really championed by Pratap, our CEO. People at Arena care deeply about the details in how our product works. Is the experience seamless? Are the details beautiful, do little things such as the animation look and feel right? Are they put together excellently? When I interviewed with the team, these aspects immediately popped out to me as a huge focus. We’re not interested in creating boring-looking products, we care very much about making beautiful things – and that’s why I joined.

What are you most excited about over the next year?

We’ve got a lot of cool product features launching soon, which are completely unlike anything else in the market. I’m excited about working together with the team to pull off some technically-challenging work. 

What is your favorite Arena memory?

This is a tough question, and it sounds corny but there are a lot of them. Every year we have a company retreat - last year’s was at Mohonk Mountain House - and we were each asked to select and present a gif to represent the year. I chose this one - come join us and I’ll explain why! 

What is your best advice for anyone interested in joining us at Arena?

If you want a shot at making beautiful, hard-to-execute, and excellent work, you should join us. We’re setting the bar for what AI multi-modal interfaces can be like, and if you want to be challenged, are up for learning on the fly, and want to push yourself — we’d love to hear from you.

We have a tradition at Arena of sharing our hot takes. What’s a hot take that you have?

Pineapple on pizza is a goated topping. Try it with hot peppers before you come at me.

Come join us in the Arena! We’re actively hiring for Design Engineers - learn more at arena-ai.com/careers.