Partee came to AI through supercomputing, building tools that linked machine learning to climate simulations before leading applied AI at Redis. At Arcade.dev he works on a problem most agent builders hit quickly: letting an agent act for a real user with real permissions.
Sam Partee is co-founder and chief technology officer of Arcade.dev, which he started in 2024 with Alex Salazar. In his words on his site, Arcade builds "the secure action layer that lets AI agents take real, authorized actions on behalf of real users."
Starting a Car Stereo Business
Partee first got into engineering by working on cars, according to Code Story. After years of it, and after starting his own car stereo installation business, he moved on to computers and stayed. He holds a computer science degree from Haverford College.
Climate Simulations at Cray
"It's an interesting background or an interesting way of getting into AI. It was through high performance computing," he said on the This New Way podcast. More than a decade ago he worked on Chapel, a parallel programming language, at Cray, which led to work on large simulations such as climate models. At Cray and Hewlett Packard Enterprise he created SmartSim, a framework for applying AI to those simulations, and published research on using deep learning in climate models.
Leading Applied AI at Redis
He then joined Redis as Principal Applied AI Engineer, where he led the applied AI team and built the company's vector search and LLM tooling, including the RedisVL library. He has contributed to open-source projects such as LangChain, DeterminedAI and Chapel.
Giving Agents Hands
Partee and Salazar started Arcade in 2024, built something quite different at first, failed fast, and landed on the problem of letting agents securely do work, he writes in his account of the founding. He explains the company with a simple picture: tools are functions an agent can call. "We call it the hands of agents," he said on This New Way. He argues that skills for coding agents and remote tool calling with user permissions are different things, and that "conflating local skills with remote authorized tool calling (MCP) is a category error." He has given a keynote at MCP Dev Summit Mumbai, in India.
Personal Life
Outside work, Partee likes to take long hikes with his snowy husky.
